October 5^th is

Apple Betty Day

Chic Spy Day *

Do Something Nice Day

World Teacher’s Day *

International Day of No Prostitution *

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MORE! Fanny Butler, Chief Joseph and Zahida Hina, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bolivia – Engineers Day

Brazil – Pinais: Festeja Curitiba

India – Raipur:
Aromatic Asian Food Festival

Indonesia – Armed Forces Day

Kenya – Nairobi:
Too Early for Birds (storytelling)

Mexico – Rosarito Beach:
Rosarito Beach Mariachi Festival

Netherlands – Amsterdam:
Verknipt Herfst Festival (fall fest)

Nigeria – Port Harcourt:
Kulture Festival

Portugal – Republic Day

South Korea – Seoul:
Seoul Street Arts Festival

Spain – Tarragona: Concurs de Castells (human tower competition)

Vanuatu – Constitution Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

539 BC – (traditional date) The army of Cyrus the Great of Persia takes Babylon

610 – The coronation of Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He and his father, who was the appointed Exarch of Africa, had come by ship from Carthage, which they used as a base of operation while leading a revolt against the unpopular usurper Phocas. Heraclius was born in Cappadocia, an ancient region that is now part of Central Anatolia in Turkey. During his reign, he made Greek the Eastern Empire’s official language.

1274 – Al-Dhahabi born, Syrian Shafi’i scholar and historian; one of his teachers was Zainab Bint ‘Umar Bin Kindi, a woman, who taught him the beginnings of the Sahih Al-Bukhari, a major Sunni text, and the book of Al-Nikaah

1450 – Louis IX, Duke of Bavaria, orders expulsion of Jews from Lower Bavaria

1665 – The Academia Holsatorum Chiloniensis is founded in Kiel, the northernmost university in the Holy Roman Empire, now called the University of Kiel

1713 – Denis Diderot born, French philosopher and critic

1789 – The Women’s March on Versailles: Parisian women march to Versailles to demand bread from Louis XVI, to insist the King and his court move to Paris, and to protest his refusal to issue decrees to abolish feudalism

1789 – William Scoresby born, British Arctic explorer and scientist; his observations in snow and crystals in the polar regions and temperature variations in the polar oceans are among the first published

1817 – Catherine Cooper Hopley born, British author, governess, artist, and naturalist; known for her books on the American Civil War, and nature books for a general audience. She traveled in the US. (1855-1862) in Ohio, Indiana and Virginia, where she spent two years, and was suspected of being a spy for the North because of her correspondence with the London press and habit of making frequent sketches of all she observed. Unable to cross the Union blockade, she was forced to travel further South, and became a tutor to the children of Florida governor John Milton. Back in England in 1863, she published her two-volume Life in the South, and a biography of Stonewall Jackson, whom she had met during her time in Virginia. Her third book, Rambles and Adventures in the Wilds of the West, published in 1872, contained her observations on American birds, plants and insects. She became increasingly interested in reptiles and amphibians, and worked in the Gardens of the London Zoological Society. Her 1882 book, Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent Life, was the first popular book on snakes in English 

1850 – Dr. Fanny Jane Butler born, pioneering English medical missionary to India, worked in Kashmir, also founded medical facilities in Srinagar and Bhagalpur

1857 – The city of Anaheim, California, is founded

1858 – Helen Churchill Candee born, American author, journalist, interior decorator and feminist; survivor of the sinking of the Titanic; How Women May Earn a Living (1900) was a best-seller, and Decorative Styles and Periods establishes her design credentials; board member of the National Woman Suffrage Association

Helen Candee, with son Harry, a guide, and
“Effie” the elephant at Angkor Wat (1922)

1864 – Louis Lumière born, French chemist, director and producer, a filmmaking pioneer

1877 – Chief Joseph surrenders his Nez Perce band to General Nelson Miles: “I will fight no more forever”

1882 – Robert H. Goddard born, American physicist, engineer and inventor; built the first liquid-fueled rocket

1883 – Ida Rubinstein born into a wealthy Jewish family, Russian dancer, art patron and Belle Époque figure.  She went to Paris under the guise of continuing her education, but secretly intent on a stage career. Her first appearances in Paris were as an actress in small roles in “indecent” garb. When word got back to her Orthodox family in St. Petersburg, they were horrified. Her brother-in-law, a Parisian doctor had her declared legally insane, and committed to an asylum, but her family demanded she be released and sent home. To gain her freedom and control of her fortune, she married her first cousin did not object to her plans to travel and perform. She was tutored by Mikhail Fokine in ballet. Sergei Diaghilev took her with the Ballet Russes back to Paris, where she danced the title role of Cléopâtre in the Paris season of 1909, and Zobéide in Scheherazade, partnered with Nijinsky, in 1910. She left the Ballet Russes in 1911 to form her own company, and used her wealth to commission lavish productions, including  Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien. which was a triumph for its stylized modernism, but the Archbishop of Paris prohibited Catholics from attending because St. Sebastian was being played by a woman and a Jew. After WWI, she appeared in plays, directed her own dance company, commissioned Boléro by Maurice Ravel in 1928. She closed the company in 1935, but often staged free ballet events and danced in some of them until the start of WWII. In 1940, she left France during the German invasion, and made her way to England.  There she helped wounded Free French soldiers. She returned to France after the war, living at Les Olivades in Vence, where she died at age 76 in 1960

1889 – Teresa de la Parra born, Venezuelan author; Iphigenia: Diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored

1892 – Remington Kellogg born, American naturalist, zoologist and paleontologist; a director of the U.S. National Museum; studied fossil pinnipeds and marine mammals, feeding habits of hawks and owls, and the predatory risk to humans of alligators

     Remington Kellogg holding Amazon River dolphin skull

1897 – End of the Brazilian War of Canudos: conflict with preacher Antônio Conselheiro and his thousands of followers in the northeastern state of Bahia becomes the deadliest civil war in Brazilian history. Conselheiro had a long history of dissension from the Catholic Church, and a growing number of his followers were calling him a Messiah. The church labeled him a madman and an apostate. Most of his “Conselhistas” were former slaves, released from bondage in 1888. He became increasingly vocal in his criticism of the new Republic of Brazil and the taxes it imposed. Confrontation with the local police in 1883 erupted into violence, and escalated into a military siege of the Conselhista community of Canudos. Conselheiro, with no military experience, just prayed and fasted, leading to his death in September 1897, further demoralizing his followers. A large force of the Brazilian army overran the village on this date, killing nearly all the inhabitants

1899 – Elda E. Anderson born, American physicist and health researcher; During WWII, she worked on the Manhattan Project at Princeton University and the Los Alamos Laboratory, where she prepared the first sample of pure uranium-235. After the war, she became the first chief of education and training in the Health Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. President of the Health Physics Society (1959-1960), and established the professional certification agency known as the American Board of Health Physics in 1960. She developed leukemia, then breast cancer, and died in 1961 at age 61

1900 – Bing Xin born as Xie Wanying, prolific Chinese poet, novelist, translator and children’s author; elected as a member of the National Senate in 1940, Bing Xin literally translates as “ice heart,” meaning a morally pure heart; The Photograph is an English language translation of her novel, about an American music teacher at a missionary school who adopts an 8-year-old Chinese girl

1900 – Margherita Bontade born, Italian Christian Democracy politician; served in the Chamber of Deputies (1948-1968); the Christian Democracy party was a Catholic-inspired, centrist party founded in 1944, which died out in 1994

1905 – Wilbur Wright in Wright Flyer III flies 24 miles in 39 minutes, a world record

1908 – Joshua Logan born, American stage and film director, producer and writer; revealed in his biography, Josh, My Up and Down, In and Out Life, that he suffered from Bipolar disorder, and had been treated with lithium

1911 – The Kowloon-Canton Railway begins service

1916 – Stetson Kennedy born, American author, folklorist, and human rights activist who infiltrated the Georgia Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s to expose their secrets to authorities and then testified against Klan leaders, who were found guilty; the state of Georgia revoked the Klan’s corporate charter after his revelations; he wrote monographs against poll taxes and other restrictions that disenfranchised the poor and minorities

1917 – Magda Szabó born, most translated Hungarian author and poet; censured by the Hungarian communist regime for not conforming to socialist realism;  The Door, Für Elise, An Old-Fashioned Story

1928 – Louise Fitzhugh born, American author-illustrator; Harriet the Spy series

1931 – Rosalie Cheeseman Gower born, Canadian nurse and political activist; a mother of four children, married to an architect who flatly refused to help out at home, she still managed to work as a nurse and as a community activist. She was appointed as a commissioner of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC – 1980-1992), where she was an effective advocate for public interest over industry profits, and improving media portrayals of women, while she maintained a working relationship with officials, advertisers, broadcasters, the public, and feminists demanding change. After she became chair of the commission, during public hearings held in a Vancouver theatre,  a woman dressed in black leather wheeled her motorcycle up the aisle, pointed a finger at the stage and demanded to know why there were men on the panel. What could they possibly know about the stereotyping of women? “Well,” Gower said, “Professor Baker must know something about women. He had two grandmothers, a mother, two wives and four daughters.”

1932 – Yvonne Braithwaite Burke born, African-American politician, U.S. Congresswoman (1973-1978), Democrat from California

1936 – Václav Havel born, Czech poet, playwright, dissident and politician, first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003)

1936 – Two hundred men, with Jarrow’s female MP Ellen Wilkinson, begin marching from the town of Jarrow to London, carrying a petition for re-establishment of industry in their town, which had ended when Jarrow’s main employer, Palmer’s shipyard, closed in 1934, after building more than a 1000 ships since 1851. While they were warmly welcomed by the London public, and Parliament received the petition, it was not debated, so the marchers believed they had failed. But the Jarrow March helped foster changes which did lead to major social reforms following WWII

1938 – Nazi Germany invalidates Jewish passports, issuing passports marked with a J for ‘Jude’ for those desiring to emigrate

1939 – Marie-Claire Blais born, French Canadian novelist, poet and playwright; noted for her first book, La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows), Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel), and L’Ange de la solitude (The Angel of Solitude). Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1986, and winner of the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award

1939 – Consuelo Ynares-Santiago born, lawyer and judge; Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (1999-2009); Court of Appeals (1990-1999); Regional Trail Court Judge (1986-1990); Municipal Judge (1973-1986)

1944 – French women win the right to vote

1945 – ‘Hollywood Black Friday’ – after six months on strike, 3oo set decorators represented by the Conference of Studio Unions picket at the Warner Brothers main gate in very hot weather – as scabs try to get past them, tempers flare and cars are stopped and overturned; reinforcements arrive from both the strikers and the studio and a riot breaks out, with studio strikebreakers using chains, hammers, pipes, night sticks, tears gas, and fire hoses in the battle; 300 police and deputy sheriffs are called to stop the violence; over 40 injuries are reported

1946 – Zahida Hina born in India, Pakistani Urdu-language columnist, essayist, short story writer, novelist and playwright; worked as journalist for Jang (1988-2005) and the Daily express, Pakistan; also writes a weekly column in Rasrang, the Sunday magazine of Dainik Bhaskar, India’s largest Hindi newspaper. She is a critic of nuclear energy for any purpose.  Has received many awards, including  Saghir Siddiqui Adabi Award, Sindh Speaker Award, and in 2001, the SAARC Literary Award given by the President
of India

1946 – Mafika Pascal Gwala born, South African poet, writer, editor and political activist; he wrote in both English and Zulu; edited the Black Review in 1973; noted for his 1982 book of poems, No More Lullabies

1947 – President Harry S. Truman makes the first televised White House address, asking Americans to give up eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe

1947 – Michèle Pierre-Louis born, Haitian independent politician; the second woman Prime Minister of Haiti (2008-2009), the first was Claudette Werleigh (1995-1996); she was voted out of office after only serving a year, by Senators in the opposing political party, who claimed she was ineffectual in improving living standards in Haiti, which is perpetually ranked as one of the poorest countries in the Americas. Pierre-Louis has been the Executive Director of the Knowledge and Freedom Foundation since 1995

1955 – Disneyland Hotel opens in Anaheim, California

1959 – Maya Lin born, artist-architect of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. (1980-82) and other public sculptures, author of Boundaries

1962 – Chic Spy Day * – The first James Bond movie, Dr. No, starring Sean Connery, premieres in London. The Vatican issues a statement that Dr. No is “a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex,” and the Kremlin denounces James Bond as the personification of capitalist evil – which insures the film’s success

1964 – Korina Sánchez born, Filipina television journalist, news anchor, field correspondent, radio news anchor and newspaper columnist, Currently Chief Correspondent for the Integrated News and Current Affairs Division of ABS-CBN Corporation, and columnist for The Philippine Star; her ‘Rated K’ segment helped people fulfill long-time wishes 

1969 – The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus airs on BBC One

1970 – Public Television: PBS is founded

1971 – Tonia Antoniazzi born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Gower since 2017; she and five other Labour MPs resigned their roles as Labour front benchers to protest the party’s Brexit position, which was to abstain in a vote on whether Britain would remain in the single market by joining the European Economic Area (EEA). The renegade MPs voted in favour of the EEA

1972 – Annely Akkermann born, Estonian politician; Member of the Estonian parliament, Riigikogu, since 2011, and serves on the Ecology Committee and the Select Budgetary Committee. She is also chair of the women’s association of IRL-Naiskogu (IREN)

1983 – Solidarity founder Lech Walesa is named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

1988 – Chilean coalition Concertación ends Augusto Pinochet’s re-election bid

1988 – Democrat Lloyd Bentsen lambastes Republican Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, telling Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”

1989 – A North Carolina jury finds PTL evangelist Jim Bakker guilty of using his TV show to defraud followers

1990 – After one hundred and fifty years The Herald broadsheet newspaper of Melbourne, Australia, is published for the last time as a separate newspaper

1994 – World Teachers Day * is founded by a coalition of teachers organizations

2000 – Mass demonstrations in Belgrade lead to resignation of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević, often called the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’

2002 – The first International Day of No Prostitution, * supported by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women

2005 – Defying President Bush, the U.S. Senate votes 90-9 to approve the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which was spearheaded by Republican Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war. The Act prohibits the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. government custody, and requiring all service members to follow procedures in the Army Field Manual when they detain and interrogate terrorism suspects. The act passed on December 30, 2005

2010 – Peace activist Mairead Corrigan Maguire lost her appeal against being deported from Israel. She had been denied entry into the country, and then held in a Tel Aviv airport detention facility since her arrival six days earlier for a Nobel women’s peace visit. The Israeli government had instituted a 10-year ban against her for her participation in a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2009, attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Maguire co-founded Women for Peace with Betty Williams, now called the Community for Peace People. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring about a peaceful solution to The Troubles in Northern Ireland

2016 – The landmark Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation cleared its final hurdle when the European Union and 10 nations submitted their official ratification of the landmark deal, which was struck last year. The treaty was to take effect 30 days after countries responsible for 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions sign on, and the latest ratifications put it over the threshold. The deal requires participants to reduce emissions to keep global temperature rise below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It took effect November 4, 2016. U.S. President Obama called the news a “turning point for our planet,” and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the support is a “testament for the urgency of action.” Of the 197 Parties to the Convention, 185 ratified the Agreement, but the Trump Administration declared in June 2017 that the U.S. would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In accordance with Article 28 of the Paris Agreement, the earliest possible effective withdrawal date by the U.S. cannot be before November 4, 2020, four years after the Agreement came into effect in the United States and one day after the 2020 U.S. presidential election

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