^
2000 Five non-Whites,
by racist Baumhammers, in a shooting rampage in suburban
Pittsburgh.
Unemployed immigration
lawyer Richard Scott Baumhammers, 34, who is White, selects his victims
because of their ethnic backgrounds. his Jewish neighbor, two Asian
men, an Indian man and a Black man. Another man of Indian descent
is critically wounded by Baumhammers as he drives from place to place
in his black Jeep. Baumhammers is mentally ill but he is deliberate
and selective in picking victims, avoiding attention, and eluding
police. Baumhammers read racist and anti-immigration literature and
saw Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Adolf Hitler as heroes.
He wanted others to help him fight against non-white immigration and
finally decided to take matters into his own hands.
On
11 May 2001, Baumhammers would be sentenced to death by a Pennsylvania
jury, becoming the 241st person on Pennsylvania's death row. As of
that date, three people have been executed in Pennsylvania since 1995.
|
1996: 35 persons, by a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle
who shoots at tourists in Tasmania. He is captured by police after a 12-hour
standoff at a guest cottage.
1995: 101 in Taegu, South Korea,
as a gas line explodes in the middle of an intersection crowded
with morning traffic.
1988 A flight attendant, as
part of the roof of an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 peeled back during a flight
from Hilo to Honolulu. 61 are injured.
1986 First victims
of Chernobyl, USSR site of world's worst nuclear power plant disaster.
1975 Hans
Arnold Heilbronn, Jewish German Canadian mathematician born
on 08 October 1908.
1968: 4-year-old strangled by 11 year-old
Mary Bell.
1962 Gianna
Beretta Molla [04 Oct 1922–], Italian pediatrician, who
refused both an abortion and a hysterectomy when she was pregnant with her
fourth child Gianna Emanuela Molla [21 Oct 1962~], despite warnings that
continuing with the pregnancy could result in her death, which it did, after
the birth of the healthy baby, who would grow up to be a physician and would
be present at the canonization of her mother on 16 May 2004. Gianna Beretta
received a good Christian education from her excellent parents. During the
years of her secondary and university education she performed apostolic
service among the youth of Catholic Action and charitable work among the
elderly and needy as a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. After
earning degrees in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Pavia in
1949, she opened a medical clinic in 1950. She specialized in Pediatrics
at the University of Milan in 1952 and thereafter gave special attention
to mothers, babies, the elderly, and the poor. She practiced medicine as
a “mission” and at the same time increased her service to Catholic Action,
especially among the “very young”. Through her prayers and those of others,
she got to know that her vocation was marriage. She married Pietro Molla
on 24 September. In November 1956 she became the mother of Pierluigi, in
December 1957 of Mariolina; in July 1959 of Laura. In September 1961 towards
the end of the second month of pregnancy, she had developed a painful fibroma
in her uterus. Before the required surgical operation, and conscious of
the risk that her continued pregnancy brought, she pleaded with the surgeon
to save the life of the child she was carrying. The life was saved. A few
days before the child was due, she said “If you must decided between me
and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child - I insist on it. Save
him”. Gianna Emanuela was born by Caesarean section. But on 28 April 1962,
amid unspeakable pain and after repeated exclamations of “Jesus, I
love you.”, the mother died. —(081027)
1955 Stephanie
Bryan, 14, abducted and murdered by Burton Abbott , in Berkeley,
California. Abbott would be executed in the gas chamber at 11:15 on 14 March
1957.
^
1945 Benito
Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, and Clara
Petacci, both shot by Italian partisans.
On this day in 1945, "Il Duce," Benito
Mussolini [29 Jul 1883–], and his mistress, Clara
Petacci [28 February 1912–], are shot by Italian partisans
who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland.
The deposed former dictator of Italy
was established by his German allies as the figurehead of a puppet
government in northern Italy during the German occupation toward the
close of the war. As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula,
defeat of the Axis powers all but certain, Mussolini considered his
options. Not wanting to fall into the hands of either British or US
troops, and knowing that the Communist partisans, who had been fighting
the remnants of roving Italian fascist soldiers and thugs in the north,
would try him as a war criminal, he settled on escape to a neutral
country.
He and his mistress
made it to the Swiss border, only to discover that the guards had
crossed over to the partisan side. Knowing they would not let him
pass, he disguised himself in a Luftwaffe coat and helmet, hoping
to slip into Austria with some German soldiers. But he and Petacci
were discovered by partisans and shot, their bodies then transported
by truck to Milan, where they were hung upside down and displayed
publicly for revilement by the masses.
Mussolini
was the first child of the local blacksmith in Predappio, Italy. In
later years he expressed pride in his humble origins and often spoke
of himself as a “man of the people.” The Mussolini family was, in
fact, less humble than he claimed—his father, a part-time socialist
journalist as well as a blacksmith, was the son of a lieutenant in
the National Guard, and his mother was a schoolteacher—but the Mussolinis
were certainly poor. They lived in two crowded rooms on the second
floor of a small, decrepit palazzo; and, because Mussolini's father
spent much of his time discussing politics in taverns and most of
his money on his mistress, the meals that his three children ate were
often meager.
A restless child,
Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. He was a bully
at school and moody at home. Because the teachers at the village school
could not control him, he was sent to board with the strict Salesian
order at Faenza, where he proved himself more troublesome than ever,
stabbing a fellow pupil with a penknife and attacking one of the Salesians
who had attempted to beat him. He was expelled and sent to the Giosuè
Carducci School at Forlimpopoli, from which he was also expelled after
assaulting yet another pupil with his penknife.
He was also intelligent, and he passed his final examinations without
difficulty. He obtained a teaching diploma and for a time worked as
a schoolmaster but soon realized that he was totally unsuited for
such work. At the age of 19, a short, pale young man with a powerful
jaw and enormous, dark, piercing eyes, he left Italy for Switzerland
with a nickel medallion of Karl Marx in his otherwise empty pockets.
For the next few months, according to his own account, he lived from
day to day, jumping from job to job.
At the same time, however, he was gaining a reputation as a young
man of strange magnetism and remarkable rhetorical talents. He read
widely and voraciously, if not deeply, the writings of philosophers
and theorists Immanuel Kant [22 Apr 1724
– 20 Feb 1804], Benedict de Spinoza [24 Nov 1632 – 21
Feb 1677], Peter Kropotkin [21 Dec 1842 – 08 Feb 1921], Friedrich
Nietzsche [15 Oct 1744 – 25 Aug 1900], G.W.F. Hegel [27 Aug
1770 – 14 Nov 1831], Karl Kautsky [16 Oct 1854 – 17 Oct
1938], and Georges Sorel [02 Nov 1837 – 30 Aug 1922], picking
out what appealed to him and discarding the rest, forming no coherent
political philosophy of his own yet impressing his companions as a
potential revolutionary of uncommon personality and striking presence.
While earning a reputation as a political journalist and public speaker,
he produced propaganda for a trade union, proposing a strike and advocating
violence as a means of enforcing demands. Repeatedly, he called for
a day of vengeance. More than once he was arrested and imprisoned.
When he returned to Italy in 1904, even the Roman newspapers had started
to mention his name.
For some time
after his return little was heard of him. He once more became a schoolmaster,
this time in the Venetian Alps, north of Udine, where he lived, so
he confessed, a life of “moral deterioration.” But soon tiring of
so wasteful a life, he returned to trade-union work, to journalism,
and to extreme politics, which led yet again to arrest and imprisonment.
During a period of freedom in
1909, he fell in love with 16-year-old Rachele Guidi, the younger
of the two daughters of his father's widowed mistress; she went to
live with him in a damp, cramped apartment in Forlì and later married
him. Soon after the marriage, Mussolini was imprisoned for the fifth
time; but by then Comrade Mussolini had become recognized as one of
the most gifted and dangerous of Italy's younger socialists. After
writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a newspaper
of his own, La Lotta di Classe. So successful was this paper
that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper,
Avanti!, whose circulation he soon doubled; and as its antimilitarist,
antinationalist, and anti-imperialist editor, he thunderously opposed
Italy's intervention in World War I. Soon, however, he changed his
mind about intervention. Swayed by Karl Marx's aphorism that social
revolution usually follows war and persuaded that “the defeat of France
would be a deathblow to liberty in Europe,” he began writing articles
and making speeches as violently in favor of war as those in which
he previously had condemned it. He resigned from Avanti! and was expelled
from the Socialist Party. Financed by a publisher who favored war
against Austria, he assumed the editorship of Il Popolo d'Italia,
in which he unequivocally stated his new philosophy: “From today onward
we are all Italians and nothing but Italians. Now that steel has met
steel, one single cry comes from our hearts—Viva l'Italia! It was
the birth cry of fascism. Mussolini went to fight in the war.
Wounded while serving with the bersaglieri
(a corps of sharpshooters), he returned home a convinced antisocialist
and a man with a sense of destiny. As early as February 1918, he advocated
the emergence of a dictator—“a man who is ruthless and energetic enough
to make a clean sweep”—to confront the economic and political crisis
then gripping Italy. Three months later, in a widely reported speech
in Bologna, he hinted that he himself might prove to be such a man.
The following year the nucleus of a party prepared to support his
ambitious idea was formed in Milan. In an office in Piazza San Sepolcro,
about 200 assorted republicans,anarchists, syndicalists, discontented
socialists, restless revolutionaries, and discharged soldiers met
to discuss the establishment of a new force in Italian politics. Mussolini
called this force the fasci di combattimento, groups of fighters bound
together by ties as close as those that secured the fasces of the
lictors—the symbols of ancient Roman authority. So fascism was created
and its symbol devised.
At rallies,
surrounded by supporters wearing black shirts, Mussolini caught the
imagination of the crowds. His physique was impressive, and his style
of oratory, staccato and repetitive, was superb. His attitudes were
highly theatrical, his opinions were contradictory, his facts were
often wrong, and his attacks were frequently malicious and misdirected;
but his words were so dramatic, his metaphors so apt and striking,
his vigorous, repetitive gestures so extraordinarily effective, that
he rarely failed to impose his mood.
Fascist squads, militias inspired by Mussolini but often created by
local leaders, swept through the countryside of the Po Valley and
the Puglian plains, rounded up Socialists, burned down union and party
offices, and terrorized the local population. Hundreds of radicals
were humiliated, beaten, or killed. In late 1920, the Black shirt
squads, often with the direct help of landowners, began to attack
local government institutions and prevent left-wing administrations
from taking power. Mussolini encouraged the squads—although he soon
tried to control them—and organized similar raids in and around Milan.
By late 1921, the Fascists controlled large parts of Italy, and the
left, in part because of its failures during the postwar years, had
all but collapsed. The government, dominated by middle-class Liberals,
did little to combat this lawlessness, both through weak political
will and a desire to see the mainly working-class left defeated. As
the Fascist movement built a broad base of support around the powerful
ideas of nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, Mussolini began planning
to seize power at the national level.
In the summer of 1922, Mussolini's opportunity presented itself. The
remnants of the trade-union movement called a general strike. Mussolini
declared that unless the government prevented the strike, the Fascists
would. Fascist volunteers, in fact, helped to defeat the strike and
thus advanced the Fascist claim to power. At a gathering of 40'000
Fascists in Naples on 24 October 1922, Mussolini threatened, “Either
the government will be given to us, or we will seize it by marching
on Rome.” Responding to his oratory the assembled Fascists excitedly
took up the cry, shouting in unison “Roma! Roma! Roma!” All appeared
eager to march. Later that day, Mussolini and other leading Fascists
decided that four days later the Fascist militia would advance on
Rome in converging columns led by four leading party members later
to be known as the Quadrumviri. Mussolini was not one of the four.
He was still hoping for a political
compromise, and he refused to move before King Victor Emmanuel III
[11 Nov 1869 – 28 Dec 1947] summoned him in writing. Meanwhile,
all over Italy the Fascists prepared for action, and the March on
Rome began. Although it was far less orderly than Fascist propaganda
later suggested, it was sufficiently threatening to bring down the
government. And the king, prepared to accept the Fascist alternative,
dispatched the telegram for which Mussolini had been waiting.
Mussolini's obvious pride in his achievement
at becoming on 31 October 1922 the youngest prime minister in Italian
history was not misplaced. He had certainly been aided by a favorable
combination of circumstances, both political and economic; but his
remarkable and sudden success also owed something to his own personality,
to native instinct and shrewd calculation, to astute opportunism,
and to his unique gifts as an agitator. Anxious to demonstrate that
he was not merely the leader of fascism but also the head of a united
Italy, he presented to the king a list of ministers, a majority of
whom were not members of his party.He made it clear, however, that
he intended to govern authoritatively. He obtained full dictatorial
powers for a year; and in that year he pushed through a law that enabled
the Fascists to cement a majority in the parliament. The elections
in 1924, though undoubtedly fraudulent, secured his personal power.
Many Italians, especially among
the middle class, welcomed his authority. They were tired of strikes
and riots, responsive to the flamboyant techniques and medieval trappings
of fascism, and ready to submit to dictatorship, provided the national
economy was stabilized and their country restored to its dignity.
Mussolini seemed to them the one man capable of bringing order out
of chaos. Soon a kind of order had been restored, and the Fascists
inaugurated ambitious programs of public works. The costs of this
order were, however, enormous. Italy's fragile democratic system was
abolished in favor of a one-party state. Opposition parties, trade
unions, and the free press were outlawed. Free speech was crushed.
A network of spies and secret policemen watched over the population.
This repression hit moderate Liberals and Catholics as well as Socialists.
Mussolini's henchmen kidnapped and murdered the Socialist deputy Giacomo
Matteotti [22 May 1885 – 10 Jun 1924], who had become one of
fascism's most effective critics in parliament. The Matteotti crisis
shook Mussolini, but he managed to maintain his hold on power.
Mussolini was hailed as a genius and
a superman by public figures worldwide. His achievements were considered
little less than miraculous. He had transformed and reinvigorated
his divided and demoralized country; he had carried out his social
reforms and public works without losing the support of the industrialists
and landowners; he had even succeeded in coming to terms with the
papacy. The reality, however, was far less rosy than the propaganda
made it appear. Social divisions remained enormous, and little was
done to address the deep-rooted structural problems of the Italian
state and economy.
Mussolini might have
remained a hero until a natural death had not his callous xenophobia
and arrogance, his misapprehension of Italy's fundamental necessities,
and his dreams of empire led him to seek foreign conquests. His eye
rested first upon Ethiopia, which, after 10 months of preparations,
rumors, threats, and hesitations, Italy invaded in October 1935. A
brutal campaign of colonial conquest followed, in which the Italians
dropped tons of gas bombs upon the Ethiopian people. Europe expressed
its horror; but, having done so, did no more. The League of Nations
imposed sanctions but ensured that the list of prohibited exports
did not include any, such as oil, that might provoke a European war.
If the League had imposed oil sanctions, Mussolini said, he would
have had to withdraw from Ethiopia within a week. But he faced no
such problem, and on the night of 09 May 1936, he announced to an
enormous, expectant crowd of about 400'000 people standing shoulder
to shoulder around Piazza Venezia in Rome that “in the 14th year of
the Fascist era” a great event had been accomplished: Italy had its
empire. This moment probably marked the peak of public support for
the regime.
Italy had also found
a new ally. Intent upon his own imperial ambitions in Austria, Adolf
Hitler [20 Apr 1889 – 30 Apr 1945]
had actively encouraged Mussolini's African adventure, and under Hitler's
guidance Germany had been the one powerful country in western Europe
that had not turned against Mussolini. The way was now open for the
Pact of Steel, a Rome-Berlin Axis and a brutal alliance between Hitler
and Mussolini that was to ruin them both. In 1938, following the German
example, Mussolini's government passed shameful anti-Semitic laws
in Italy that discriminated against Jews in all sectors of public
and private life and prepared the way for the deportation of some
20% of Italy's Jews to German death camps during the war.
While Mussolini understood that peace was essential to Italy's well-being,
that a long war might prove disastrous, and that he must not “march
blindly with the Germans,” he was beset by concerns that the Germans
“might do good business cheaply” and that by not intervening on their
side in World War II he would lose his “part of the booty.” His foreign
secretary and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano conte di Cortellazzo [18
Mar 1903 – 11 Jan 1944], recorded that during a long, inconclusive
discussion at the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini at first agreed that
Italy must not go to war, “then he said that honor compelled him to
march with Germany.”
Mussolini
watched the progress of Hitler's war with bitterness and alarm, becoming
more and more bellicose with each fresh German victory, while frequently
expressing hope that the Germans would be slowed down or would meet
with some reverse that would satisfy his personal envy and give Italy
breathing space. When Germany advanced westward, however, and France
seemed on the verge of collapse, Mussolini felt he could delay no
longer. So, on 10 June 1940, the shameful declaration of war was made.
From the beginning the war went
badly for Italy, and Mussolini's opportunistic hopes for a quick victory
soon dissolved. France surrendered before there was an opportunity
for even a token Italian victory, and Mussolini left for a meeting
with Hitler, sadly aware, as Ciano put it, that his opinion had “only
a consultative value.” Indeed, from then on Mussolini was obliged
to face the fact that he was the junior partner in the Axis alliance.
The Germans kept the details of most of their military plans concealed,
presenting their allies with a fait accompli for fear that prior discussion
would destroy surprise. And thus the Germans made such moves as the
occupation of Romania and the later invasion of the Soviet Union without
any advance notice to Mussolini.
It was to “pay back Hitler in his own coin,” as Mussolini openly admitted,
that he decided to attack Greece through Albania in 1940 without informing
the Germans. The result was an extensive and ignominious defeat, and
the Germans were forced unwillingly to extricate him from its consequences.
The 1941 campaign to support the German invasion of the Soviet Union
also failed disastrously and condemned thousands of ill-equipped Italian
troops to a nightmarish winter retreat. Hitler had to come to his
ally's help once again in North Africa. After the Italian surrender
in North Africa in 1943, the Germans began to take precautions against
a likely Italian collapse. Mussolini had grossly exaggerated the extent
of public support for his regime and for the war. When the Western
Allies successfully invaded Sicily in July 1943, it was obvious that
collapse was imminent.
For some
time Italian Fascists and non-Fascists alike had been preparing Mussolini's
downfall. On 24 July 1943, at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council—the
supreme constitutional authority of the state, which had not met once
since the war began—an overwhelming majority passed a resolution that
in effect dismissed Mussolini from office. Disregarding the vote as
a matter of little concern and refusing to admit that his minions
could harm him, Mussolini appeared at his office the next morning
as though nothing had happened. That afternoon, however, he was arrested
by royal command on the steps of the Villa Savoia after an audience
with the king.
Imprisoned first
on the island of Ponza, then on a remoter island off the coast of
Sardinia, he was eventually transported to a hotel high on the Gran
Sasso d'Italia in the mountains of Abruzzi, from which his rescue
by the Germans was deemed impossible. Nevertheless, by crash-landing
gliders on the slopes behind the hotel, German commandos on 12 September
1943, effected his escape by air to Munich.
Rather than allow the Germans to occupy and govern Italy entirely
in their own interests, Mussolini agreed to Hitler's suggestion that
he establish a new Fascist government in the north and execute those
members of the Grand Council, including his son-in-law, Ciano, who
had dared to vote against him. But the Repubblica Sociale Italiana
thus established at Salò was, as Mussolini himself grimly admitted
to visitors, no more than a puppet government at the mercy of the
German command. And there, living in dreams and “thinking only of
history and how he would appear in it,” as one of his ministers said,
Mussolini awaited the inevitable end. Meanwhile, Italian Fascists
maintained their alliance with the Germans and participated in deportations,
the torture of suspected partisans, and the war against the Allies.
As German defenses in Italy collapsed
and the Allies advanced rapidly northward, the Italian Communists
of the partisan leadership decided to execute Mussolini. Rejecting
the advice of various advisers, including the elder of his two surviving
sons (his second son had been killed in the war), Mussolini refused
to consider flying out of the country, and he made for the Valtellina,
intending perhaps to make a final stand in the mountains; but only
a handful of men could be found to follow him. He tried to cross the
frontier disguised as a German soldier in a convoy of trucks retreating
toward Innsbruck, in Austria. But he was recognized and, together
with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, who had insisted on remaining
with him to the end, he was shot and killed on 28 April 1945. Their
bodies were hung, head downward, in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. Huge,
jubilant crowds celebrated the fall of the dictator and the end of
the war. The great mass of the Italian people greeted Mussolini's
death without regret. He had lived beyond his time and had dragged
his country into a disastrous war, which it was unwilling and unready
to fight. Democracy was restored in the country after 20 years of
dictatorship, and a neo-fascist party that carried on Mussolini's
ideals won only 2% of the vote in the 1948 elections.
Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini [30 Dec 1962~] would
join in 1992 the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale (which since
changed its name to Alleanza Nazionale) and then be elected to the
Italian parliament. But later Alleanza Nazionale changed direction.
Incensed that party leader Gianfranco Fini had said that fascism was
“an absolute evil”, Alessandra Mussolini would resign
from that party on 28 November 2003, saying that her reason is “E'
stata sancita una incompatibilità e un pregiudizio non tanto con le
mie posizioni politiche, ma con il cognome che porto.”
|
1927 John Reinhard Weguelin, British painter of genre,
classical, biblical and historical subjects, born on 23 June 1849.
— MORE
ON WEGUELIN AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
 1915
Salvador Viniegra y Lasso, Spanish artist born on 23 November 1862.
— more with
link to an image.
1905 Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, English
US painter born on 05 August 1819, specialized in Animals.
— MORE
ON TAIT AT ART “4” APRIL with
links to images.
1903 Josiah
Willard Gibbs, Connecticut mathematical physicist born on 11
February 1839. He is best-known for the Gibbs Effect seen when Fourier-analyzing
a discontinuous function.
1883 Jules-Adolphe Goupil,
French painter born on 07 May 1839. — links
to images.
1843 William
Wallace, Scottish mathematician and astronomer born on 23 September
1768. He worked on geometry and in 1799 discovered the so-called Simson
Line of a triangle [diagram >], which is the straight line
(DEF in the diagram) on which are the feet of the perpendiculars to the
three sides of a triangle from any point P on the circle circumscribed to
the triangle [a
proof]. Wallace invented the pantograph. He is the author of A New
Book of Interest containing Aliquot Tables and Geometrical Theorems
and Analytical Formulae.
1825 Gerrit Jan van Leeuwen,
Dutch artist born on 29 June 1756.
1807 Jacob Philippe
Hackert, German painter born on 15 September 1737, specialized
in Landscapes.
— MORE
ON HACKERT AT ART “4” SEPTEMBER
with links to images. |
2003
Noven Pharmaceuticals
(NOVN) announces that it has received notification from the US Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) that the New Drug Application (NDA) for its methylphenidate
(the active ingredient in Ritalin) transdermal system (to treat the symptoms
of ADHD,
attention deficiency hyperactivity disorder) is not approvable at this time.
On the NASDAQ, 9 million of the 22.6 million NOVN shares are traded, dropping
from their previous close of $14.45 to an intraday low of $8.10 and closing
at $8.97. They had traded as low as $7.30 on 31 January 2003, but then,
when Noven licensed its anti-ADS patch for world-wide distribution to the
British firm Shire, the NOVN shares, from an intraday low of $7.75 on 26
February 2003 had risen to an intraday high of $14.69 on 28 March 2003.
Prior to that, they had traded as high as $27.51 on 11 June 2002, and $60.25
on 23 October 2000. [5~year price chart >]
In the Pacific Ocean, Fletcher Christian, the first mate on the H.M.S.
Bounty, leads a successful 
In December 1787, the Bounty left England for Tahiti in the South Pacific,
where it was to collect a cargo of breadfruit saplings to transport to the
West Indies. There, the breadfruit would serve as food for slaves. After
a 10-month journey, the Bounty arrived in Tahiti in October 1788 and remained
there for more than five months. On Tahiti, the crew enjoyed an idyllic
life, reveling in the comfortable climate, lush surroundings, and the famous
hospitality of the Tahitians. Fletcher Christian fell in love with a Tahitian
woman named Mauatua.
