2002:: 35 pilgrims, including 10 children, in Zinapecuaro, Mexico, in bus, whose brakes failing, goes through a toll booth and crashes into a concrete wall. Some 20 are injured. The 26-year-old Costa Grande bus was taking members of the conservative Luz del Mundo church, from the state of Guerrero, to a a re-enactment of the Last Supper in Guadalajara.
2002 Ali Ajouri, 23, and Murat Marshut, 19, both of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, shot by Israeli troops in Jabaa, West Bank. Israel says that Ajouri sent two suicide bombers who killed three foreign workers and two Israelis in Tel Aviv on 17 July 2002. The Reuters body count of the al-Aqsa intifada stands at “at least” 1484 Palestinians and 585 Israelis.
2002 Nine Hindu pilgrims and one of the half-dozen Muslim attackers who, before dawn, throw a hand grenade and shoot in the pilgrimage transit camp in Nunwan, Indian-occupied Kashmir. Police return fire. 27 pilgrims are wounded.
2001 General Duong Van “big” Minh, 86, in Pasadena, California, from a fall suffered the previous day. He was South Vietnam's president when on 30 April 1975 it surrendered unconditionally to to the Vietcong's “Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam”. A military adviser (1962–63) to President Diem, he helped to overthrow Diem in 1963. He was head of government (1963–64), after which he went into exile. Minh returned in 1968, serving as an opposition leader against President Thieu. A presidential candidate in 1971, Minh withdrew, charging election rigging. After Nguyen Van Thieu fled the country on 21 April 1975, his successor transferred his powers to Big Minh on 28 April 1975, in an unsuccessful conciliation effort but Minh was placed in detention after the Communist takeover.
2000 Many sprats which rain down, freshly dead, on the fishing port of Great Yarmouth, in the east England county of Norfolk, after being sucked up by a waterspout.
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1998 André Weil, 92,
in Princeton Weil was born on 6 May 1906 in Paris, of Jewish parents. He studied at universities in Paris, Rome and Göttingen, receiving his D.Sc. from the University of Paris in 1928. He then taught at various universities, for example the Aligarh Muslim University in India from 1930 to 1932, and the University of Strasbourg, France from 1933 until the outbreak of World War II.  The
war was a disaster for Weil who was a conscientious objector and so
wished to avoid military service. He fled to Finland as soon as war
was declared in an attempt to avoid becoming forced into the army,
but it was not a simple matter to escape from the war in Europe at
this time. He was sent from Finland back to France where he was put
in prison. Weil was certainly in great danger at this time, partly
because he was Jewish, partly because he had a sister, Simone Weil
who was a mystic philosopher and a leading figure in the French Résistance.
The dangers of his predicament made Weil decide that being in the
army was a better bet and he was able to argue successfully for his
release on the condition that indeed he did join the army.Having used the army as a reason to get out of prison, Weil had no intention of serving any longer than he possibly could. As soon as the chance to escape to the United States came, he took it at once. In the United States he went to Pennsylvania where he taught from 1941 at Haverford College and at Swarthmore College. In 1945 he accepted a position in Sao Paulo University, Brazil where he remained until 1947. In 1947 Weil returned to the United States and he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago, a position he continued to hold until 1958. In 1948-49, John Canu and his father, a visiting professor at Chicago that year, were often guests of Weil. From 1958 Weil worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He retired in 1976, becoming Professor Emeritus at that time. Weil's research was in number theory, algebraic geometry and group theory. His work can be summarized thus: Beginning in the 1940s, Weil started the rapid advance of algebraic geometry and number theory by laying the foundations for abstract algebraic geometry and the modern theory of abelian varieties. His work on algebraic curves has influenced a wide variety of areas, including some outside mathematics, such as elementary particle physics and string theory. In fact Weil's work in this area was basic to work by mathematicians such as Yau who was awarded a Fields Medal in 1982 for work in three-dimensional algebraic geometry which has major applications to quantum field theory. Yau is not the only mathematician who received a Fields Medal for work which continued that begun by Weil. In 1978 Deligne was awarded a Fields Medal for solving the Weil Conjectures. Here is a description of Weil's fundamental contribution: One of Weil's major achievements was his proof of the Riemann hypothesis for the congruence zeta functions of algebraic function fields. In 1949 he raised certain conjectures about the congruence zeta function of algebraic varieties over finite fields. These Weil conjectures, as they came to be called, grew out of his deep insight into the topology of algebraic varieties and provided guiding principles for subsequent developments in the field. Weil's work on bringing together number theory and algebraic geometry was highly fruitful. The foundations of many topics studied in depth today were laid by Weil in this work, such as the foundations of the theory of modular forms, automorphic functions and automorphic representations. However, Weil's work was of major importance in a number of other new mathematical topics. He contributed substantially to topology, differential geometry and complex analytic geometry. It was not just to these areas that he contributed but, even more importantly, his work brought out fundamental relationships between the areas when he studied harmonic analysis on topological groups and characteristic classes. Also bringing these areas together was his work on the geometric theory of the theta function and Kähler geometry. Together with Dieudonné and others, Weil wrote under the name Nicolas Bourbaki, a project they began in the 1930s, in which they attempted to give a unified description of mathematics. The purpose was to reverse a trend which they disliked, namely that of a lack of rigour in mathematics. The influence of Bourbaki has been great over many years but it is now less important since it has basically succeeded in its aim of promoting rigour and abstraction. Weil's most famous books include Foundations of Algebraic Geometry (1946) and Elliptic Functions According to Eisenstein and Kronecker (1976). Weil received many honors for his outstanding mathematics. Among these has been honorary membership of the London Mathematical Society in 1959 and election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of London in 1966. In addition he has been elected to the Academy of Sciences in Paris and to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. Weil was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1950 at Harvard and again at the following International Congress in 1954. In 1979 Weil was awarded the Wolf Prize and, in the following year, the American Mathematical Society awarded him their Steele Prize. In 1994 he received the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation of Japan ... for outstanding achievement and creativity. The citation for the Kyoto Prize reads: The results achieved and problems raised by André Weil through his deep understanding of and sharp insight into mathematical sciences in general will continue to have immeasurable influence on the development of mathematical sciences, and to contribute greatly to the development of science, as well as the deepening and uplifting of the human spirit. Quotations by André Weil Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced ... the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously... this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work... The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician. God exists since mathematics is consistent,
and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it. Rigor is to the mathematician what morality is to men. First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people. André Weil: A Prologue / André Weil (1906 — 1998) / André Weil and Algebraic Topology / André Weil as I Knew Him [this “I” is not me] / The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician — -Autobiography of André Weil // Fermat's Last Theorem |
1986 William J. Schroeder, after living 620 days with the Jarvik 7 artificial heart.
1980 Marino Marini, Italian painter and sculptor, born on 27 February 1901 — more with links to images.
1978 Paul VI, 80, Pope since 1963, of heart attack, at summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
1973 Fulgencio Batista, ex presidente y dictador de Cuba.
 1945,
80'000 men, women, and children, in Hiroshima nuclear horror.
^top^
At 08:16. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world's first nuclear bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Some 80'000 people, almost a third of the population, are killed as by the blast and the resulting fire storm, and another 35'000 are injured. At least another 60'000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. US President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference's demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland. And so on August 5, while a "conventional" bombing of Japan was underway, one of the two nuclear bombs available was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets' plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets' B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 02:45. on 06 August. Five and a half hours later, the bomb is dropped, exploding 580 m over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12'500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read "Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis" (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas). There were 90'000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28'000 remained after the bombing. Of the city's 200 doctors before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were 1780 nurses before — only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying. According to John Hersey's classic work Hiroshima, the Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when the Enola Gay dropped its load. There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay stopped trying to count them. Another crewman remarked, “It's pretty terrific! What a relief! It worked!” In all some 200'000 innocent men, women, and children, would eventually die, if not from the burns, then a slow, agonizing, unprecedented death from radiation sickness, as a result of that bomb and of the one dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Three days later, the major coastal city of Nagasaki would be hit, prompting Japan's unconditional surrender and bringing the most costly war in human history to an end. Both cities would be rebuilt, but the horror of the world's only nuclear attacks would remain. By the end of 1945, a total of some 200'000 people had perished as a result of the bombings. Many of those who survived faced a future of disease, premature death, and birth defects in children yet to be born. Thereafter this day would be commiserated (rather than commemorated) as 1945 “Hiroshima Peace Day”. |
| The
United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry
during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of
Hiroshima. Though the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan marked
the end of World War II, many historians argue that it also ignited
the Cold War. Since 1940, the United States had been working on developing
an atomic weapon, after having been warned by Albert Einstein that
Nazi Germany was already conducting research into nuclear weapons.
By the time the United States conducted the first successful test
(an atomic bomb was exploded in the desert in New Mexico in July 1945),
Germany had already been defeated. The war against Japan in the Pacific,
however, continued to rage. President Harry S. Truman, warned by some
of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japan would result in horrific
American casualties, ordered that the new weapon be used to bring
the war to a speedy end. On 06 August 1945, the American bomber Enola
Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A
blast equivalent to the power of 15'000 tons of TNT reduced four square
miles of the city to ruins and immediately killed 80'000 people. Tens
of thousands more died in the following weeks from wounds and radiation
poisoning. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city
of Nagasaki, killing nearly 40'000 more people. A few days later,
Japan announced its surrender. In the years since the two atomic bombs
were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that
the weapons had a two-pronged objective. First, of course, was to
bring the war with Japan to a speedy end and spare US lives. It has
been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new
weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations
between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly.
The Potsdam Conference between US President Harry S. Truman, Russian
leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced
by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima.
The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the
US and the USSR. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe.
Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the US atomic monopoly
might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion,
the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first
shot of the Cold War. If US officials truly believed that they could
use their atomic monopoly for diplomatic advantage, they had little
time to put their plan into action. By 1949, the Soviets had developed
their own atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race began.
Ce jour du 6 août 1945 restera le plus horrible du siècle. Aucune autre tragédie n’a pu l’effacer des mémoires. Que s’est-il donc passé dans la tête des dirigeants américains ? Accélérer la fin de la guerre en précipitant la reddition du Japon ou tester l’arme nucléaire qui était toute nouvelle ? Les deux sans doute. La guerre, en vérité, était pratiquement terminée ce 6 août 1945 : les Alliés étaient entrés dans l’Allemagne vaincue en mai, la conférence de Yalta, qui devait partager le monde entre l’URSS et les Alliés, avait eu lieu en février, les Soviétiques avaient pris la capitale allemande, Hitler s’était suicidé en avril et le même mois Mussolini avait été exécuté par des partisans le 28 avril. Il ne restait de la guerre que l’entêtement japonais, tout relatif. Entre février et mai 1945, le Japon avait perdu des batailles décisives, perdu plus de 100 000 hommes et 4 000 avions, perdu des territoires comme Iwo Jima et Okinawa face aux Américains, et Tokyo avait été bombardée le 10 mars. Le Japon était affaibli même s’il refusait de capituler comme l’avaient fait ses alliés allemands et italiens. Cette bombe était alors de trop. L’idée que les USA voulaient faire un test en live n’est toujours pas exclue. Le 16 Jul, soit vingt jours avant Hiroshima, ils avaient testé une bombe atomique dans le désert de Los Alamos, dans le Nouveau Mexique. Ce 06 Aug et le 09 Aug, ils l’essayaient sur des êtres humains : à Hiroshima et à Nagasaki, la bombe avait fait 120 000 morts et 2 villes détruites. Le mikado comprit alors la puissance de cette arme de destruction qui menaçait de détruire tout le Japon et annonça le 14 Aug sa capitulation qui sera signée le 02 septembre dans la rade de Tokyo, en présence de MacArthur. |
1925 Ricci-Curbastro, mathematician.
1923 Luigi Rossi, Swiss artist born on 10 March 1853. — MORE ON ROSSI AT ART “4” AUGUST with links to images.
1919 John Merrick, born a slave on 07 September 1859, Black barber who, on 20 October 1898, together with two other Blacks, Charles Clinton Spaulding [01 Aug 1874 – 01 Aug 1952] and physician Aaron McDuffie Moore [06 Sep 1863 – 1923], organized the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association which began business on 01 April 1899. Its first office rented for $2 a month. The name would be changed to North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company on 07 April 1919. Merrick had tobacco executive Washington Duke as a regular customer, whose advice from the barber chair helped the insurance company survive.
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1890 William Kemmler, murderer, executed by
electrocution, a first At Auburn Prison in New York, the first execution by the electric chair in history is carried out on William Kemmler, convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe. Electrocution as a more humane means of execution was first suggested in 1881 by Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist. Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard "painlessly" killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York. In 1889, New York's Electrical Execution Law, the first of its kind in the world, went into effect, and Edwin R. Davis, the Auburn Prison electrician, was commissioned to design an electric chair. Closely resembling the modern device, Davis's chair was fitted with two electrodes, which were composed of metal disks sandwiched between a rubber holder and covered with a damp sponge. The electrodes were to be applied to the criminal's head and back. On 06 August 1890, William Kemmler, convicted of first-degree murder, becomes the first person to be sent to the chair. After he is strapped in, a charge of approximately 700 volts is delivered for only seventeen seconds before the current fails. Witnesses smell burnt clothing and charred flesh, but Kemmler is far from dead, and a second shock is prepared, of 1030 volts this time and applied for about two minutes, whereupon smoke is observed coming from the head of Kemmler, who is clearly dead. An autopsy showed that the brain below the headpiece had hardened and the flesh under the electrode on the back had burned through to the spine. Dr. Alfred P. Southwick applauded Kemmler's execution with the declaration, "We live in a higher civilization from this day on," while American inventor George Westinghouse, an innovator of the use of electricity, remarked, "They would have done better with an axe." |
1923 Luigi Rossi, Swiss artist born on 10 March 1853.
1875 Gabriel García Moreno, político ecuatoriano.
1874 Jim Reed, outlaw, killed by a member of his gang for reward money. Reed's widow “Belle” (née Myra Maybelle Shirley) would marry two years later Reed's bandit mentor, Cherokee Tom Starr, and become know as the “Bandit Queen”. Both Belle and Starr would separately die shot within a few years.
1867 Faustin-Élie Soulouque emperor of Haiti, dies (birth date unknown)
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1862 C.S.S. Arkansas, 25 days old,
blown up by its crew. The C.S.S. Arkansas, the most feared Confederate ironclad on the Mississippi River, is blown up by her crew after suffering mechanical problems during a battle with the USS. Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Arkansas's career lasted just 23 days. In August 1861, the Confederate Congress appropriated $160'000 to construct two ironclad ships for use on the Mississippi. Similar in style to the more famous C.S.S. Virginia (Merrimack), both the ships were 50 meters long and 11 meters wide, and were constructed in Memphis. Since a labor shortage delayed completion, they were not finished when the Union captured Memphis in May 1862. One ironclad was burned to prevent capture, and the Arkansas was towed south to the Yazoo River. Lieutenant Isaac Brown, the ship's commander, showed great innovation and determination in completing construction of the craft. A sunken barge loaded with railroad rails was raised so that the rails could be bolted to the hull of the Arkansas, and local planters opened their forges to the builders. On 12 July, the work was completed and Brown steered the ship down the Yazoo and into the Mississippi. The Arkansas came out of the Yazoo with guns blazing. She ran off three Union ships, inflicting heavy damage on two of them, and ran a gauntlet of 16 Union ships, damaging several as she slipped down the river toward Vicksburg. The Union commander, Admiral David Farragut, was furious that a single ship could cause so much damage to his flotilla, so he sent his ships in pursuit of the Confederate menace. At dusk, Farragut marked the position of the Arkansas as it lay anchored at Vicksburg. In the dark, he sent his ships one by one past this position, and each ship fired a volley into the spot where the Arkansas should have been. But Brown had fooled the Yankees by moving his ship after dark. The Arkansas sparred with two other Union ships on 22 July, successfully running off the ships but suffering damage to her engines. The ship was ordered south to Baton Rouge on 03 August to support Confederate operations there, but the Arkansas suffered more engine problems and ran aground. While the crew worked on repairs, the USS. Essex steamed up for a confrontation. The Arkansas set sail, but a propeller shaft broke and left the vessel circling helplessly. She ran aground again, and the crew blew up the ship before the Essex could move in for the kill. Although the Arkansas was never defeated, unreliable engines doomed the craft to an early death. |
1702 Claude Huillot, French artist born in 1632.
1694 Antoine Arnauld, 82, mathematician.
1660 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Spain's greatest Baroque era painter, baptized as an infant on 06 June 1599. — MUCH MORE ON VELAZQUEZ AT ART “4” AUGUST, including a wealth of links to artwork.
1609 Federico Zuccaro, Italian painter, draftsman, and writer, born in 1541, give or take one year. — more
1002 El amir cordobés Almanzor ibn Abí, durante la Batalla de Calatañazor, enfrentamiento entre una coalición navarro-castellana y las tropas amiridas.
0768 (or 769?) Constantine II, anti-Pope. Even before Paul I's death (28 June 767) trouble began about the election of his successor. Duke Toto of Nepi with a body of Tuscans burst into Rome, and, despite the opposition of the primicerius (chief of the notaries) Christopher, forcibly intruded his brother Constantine, a layman, into the chair of Peter (5 July 767). In the spring of 768, however, Christopher and his son Sergius contrived to escape from the city, and with the aid of the troops sent to Rome by Lombard king Desiderius, killed Toto and blinded and deposed the usurper, who had . failed to win support from the Carolingian king Pépin III le Bref or from the Franks. Constantine's deposition was canonically ratified by a council of Italian and Frankish bishops.
0523 Saint Hormisdas, 52nd Pope
0258 Saint Sixtus II, 24th Pope
— 133 BC The defenders of Numantia, a Celtiberian town located near modern Soria in Spain on the upper Duero River, the center of Celtiberian resistance to Rome for seven years. In early January 133, Scipio Aemilianus “Numantinus” blockaded it with 10 km of continuous ramparts around it. Numantia is now reduced by hunger, and rather than surrender, the survivors set fire to the city and throw themselves into the flames. The destruction of Numantia ends all serious resistance to Rome in Celtiberia. Numantia would later be rebuilt by order of the emperor Augustus, but it would no longer be important.
