Laikrastis2

APRIL 17

RUSSWOOD PARK, A BASEBALL STADIUM IN MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, BURNS TO THE GROUND FROM A FIRE SHORTLY AFTER A CHICAGO WHITE SOX VERSUS CLEVELAND INDIANS MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAME.

MUHAMMAD ALI GOLD IN ROME. 1960 / SEPTEMBER 05

MARCH O5

ALBERTO KORDA TAKES HIS ICONIC PHOTOGRAPH OF CHE GUEVARA, GUERRILLERO HEROICO, IN HAVANA.

JANUARY 02

U.S. SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY (D-MA) ANNOUNCES HIS CANDIDACY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION.

JANUARY 28

THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE ANNOUNCED EXPANSION TEAMS FOR DALLAS TO START IN THE 1960 NFL SEASON AND MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL FOR 1961 NFL SEASON.

JANUARY 10

JANUARY 30

THE AFRICAN NATIONAL PARTY IS FOUNDED IN CHAD, THROUGH THE MERGER OF TRADITIONALIST PARTIES. FEBRUARY 09 NOVEMBER 02

JOANNE WOODWARD RECEIVES THE FIRST STAR ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

PENGUIN BOOKS IS FOUND NOT GUILTY OF OBSCENITY IN THE CASE OF D. H. LAWRENCE’S NOVEL LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER.

ASWAN HIGH DAM CONSTRUCTION BEGINS IN EGYPT. FEBRUARY 13

FEBRUARY 29

FRANCE TESTS ITS FIRST ATOMIC BOMB - IN THE SAHARA DESERT OF ALGERIA.

THE 1960 AGADIR EARTHQUAKE COMPLETELY DESTROYS THE TOWN OF AGA.

FEBRUARY 11

THE N CLASS BLIMP ZPG-3W OF THE U.S. NAVY IS DESTROYED DURING A STORM OVER MASSACHUSETTS.

international fears contributing to this conclusion.

For example, the fear of Soviet penetration into Africa and the Cold War politics was an international concern that helped initiate the dismantling of the British Empire. The independence of British Somaliland in 1960, along with the “Wind of Change” speech that Macmillan delivered in South Africa earlier in the same year, is what started the decade when the dismantling of the British Empire reached its climax, as no fewer than twenty-seven former colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean left the empire and started their independence.

At the same time the African nationalists were becoming increasingly demanding in their initiative for self rule. Although it was unclear how to decolonize the nation or when to try. The path to independence in the Southern African states proved more problematic because the white settler population became hostile towards the majority rule.

JANUARY 09-11

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER HAROLD MACMILLAN MAKES THE WIND OF CHANGE SPEECH FOR THE FIRST TIME.

JANUARY 02

U.S. SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY (D-MA) ANNOUNCES HIS CANDIDACY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION. 1960 Democratic National Convention / The 1960 Democratic National Convention was held in Los Angeles. It nominated Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts for President and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas for Vice President. In the general election, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket won an electoral college victory and a narrow popular vote plurality (slightly over 110,000 nationally) over the Republican candidates Vice President Richard M. Nixon and UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Presidential nomination / In the week before the convention opened, Kennedy received two new challengers when Lyndon B. Johnson, the powerful Senate Majority Leader from Texas, and Adlai Stevenson II, the party’s nominee in 1952 and 1956, announced their candidacies. However, neither Johnson nor Stevenson was a match for the talented and highly efficient Kennedy campaign team led by Robert Kennedy. Johnson challenged Kennedy to a televised debate before a joint meeting of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations; Kennedy accepted. Most observers felt that Kennedy won the debate, and Johnson was not able to expand his delegate support beyond the South. Stevenson was popular among many liberal delegates, especially in California, but his two landslide defeats in 1952 and 1956 led party leaders to search for a “fresh face” who had a better chance of winning.

JANUARY 10

ASWAN HIGH DAM CONSTRUCTION BEGINS IN EGYPT. Construction history / The earliest recorded attempt to build a dam near Aswan was in the 11th century, when the Arab polymath and engineer Ibn al-Haytham (known as Alhazen in the West) was summoned to Egypt by the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, to regulate the flooding of the Nile, a task requiring an early attempt at an Aswan Dam. His field work convinced him of the impracticality of this scheme.

Aswan Dam / The Aswan Dam is an embankment dam situated across the Nile River in Aswan, Egypt.

Since the 1960s, the name commonly refers to the High Dam. Construction of the High Dam became a key objective of the Egyptian Government following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, as the ability to control floods, provide water for irrigation, and generate hydroelectricity were seen as pivotal to Egypt’s industrialization. The High Dam was constructed between 1960 and 1970, and has had a significant impact on the economy and culture of Egypt.

Before the dams were built, the Nile River flooded every year during late summer, when water flowed down the valley from its East African drainage basin. These floods brought high water and natural nutrients and minerals that annually enriched the fertile soil along the floodplain and delta; this had made the Nile valley ideal for farming since ancient times.

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Because floods vary, in high-water years the whole crop might be wiped out, while in low-water years widespread drought and famine occasionally occurred. As Egypt’s population grew and conditions changed, both a desire and ability developed to control the floods, and thus both protect and support farmland and the economically important cotton crop. With the reservoir storage provided by the Aswan dams, the floods could be lessened and the water stored for later release.

Wind of Change (speech) / The Wind of Change speech was a historically important address made

by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to the Parliament of South Africa, on 3 February 1960 in Cape Town. He had spent a month in Africa visiting a number of British colonies, as they were at the time. The speech signalled clearly that the Conservative-controlled British Government intended to grant independence to many of these territories, which indeed happened subsequently, with most of the British possessions in Africa becoming independent nations in the 1960s. The Labour governments of 1945–51 had started a process of decolonisation but this policy had been halted by the Conservative governments from 1951 onwards.

African nationalism / African nationalism escalated throughout the Second World War. The British needed to secure their control over their colonies in Africa in order to benefit and utilize its essential resources to fight against the Axis powers. The African colonies wanted to receive rewards for their help throughout the war, they were after political and economical opportunity. They became bitter when these rewards were not presented to them and they started rioting, the colony stood on the edge of a revolution. Shortly after this West African political leader Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) orchestrated a campaign of civil disobedience to start a system of self government. In the 1951 election, the CPP won thirty-four of thirty-eight seats and Nkrumah became the prime minister, resulting in the colony’s independence under Nkrumah’s leadership as the state of Ghana in 1957.

The speech acquired its name from a now-famous quotation embedded in it. Macmillan said: “ The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

JANUARY 19

THE TREATY OF MUTUAL COOPERATION AND SECURITY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN IS SIGNED IN WASHINGTON, D.C. Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan / Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan was first signed in 1952 following the siging of the Treaty of San Francisco (commonly known as the Peace Treaty of San Francisco). Then, it was later amended further on January 1960 between the United States and Japan in Washington. When the Treaty was first signed, it contained amendments that permitted the United States to not only to act for the sake of maintaing peace in East Asia, but also permitted for the United States to exert its power on Japanese domestic quarrels. The latter part mentioned has been deleted in the revised version of the Treaty. In the amended treaty, articles that delineate mutual defense obligations, the US obligations to pre-inform Japan in times of the US army mobilization were included to alleviate unequal status suggested in the treaty signed in 1952.

The treaty established that any attack against Japan or the United States perpetrated within Japanese territorial administration would be dangerous to the respective countries’ own peace and safety. It requires both countries to act to meet the common danger. To support this requirement, it provided for the continued presence of U.S. military bases in Japan. The treaty also included general provisions on the further development of international cooperation and on improved future economic cooperation. This treaty has lasted longer than any other alliance between two great powers since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Supposedly, the treaty is a 10-year-term, but unless there is unilateral or mutual decision to discard the treaty, the contents of the treaty remain binding upon two nations de facto indefinitely, and thus the treaty is effective up till now.

In 2012, the United States clarified in a statement over the dispute over the Senkaku Islands that the US-Japan Security Treaty does cover the islands, and obliges the US to defend them as Japanese territory.

Support for agreement / Despite strong Okinawan opposition to the US military presence on the island, there is also strong support for the agreement. Due to of a new imperialistic Japan, US forces forced Japanese lawmakers to forbid Japan to maintain more than self-defense-sized armed forces when drafting the post-War Constitution.

As a result Japan has never spent more than one percent of its GDP on military expenditures (Englehardt, 2010). In return for allowing the US military presence in Japan, the United States agrees to help defend Japan against any foreign adversaries, such as North Korea.

The occasion was in fact the second time on which Macmillan had given this speech: he was repeating an address already made in Accra, Ghana (formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast) on 10 January 1960. This time it received press attention, at least partly because of the stony reception that greeted it.

Macmillan’s Cape Town speech also made it clear that Macmillan included South Africa in his comments and indicated a shift in British policy in regard to apartheid with Macmillan saying:

Although this is a significant victory for this area there were still many parts of Africa left with all the want of a self ruling nation but containing quote a few hostile white settlers in the area.

These white settlers dominated the economic and political powers at this time. They asserted this dominance by denying universal suffrage to African’s and by trying to persuade the British government to consolidate colonial territories into federations. Although, this sense of African nationalism could not be contained by a minority of

“ As a fellow member of the Commonwealth it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won’t mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which in our own territories we are trying to give effect.

white settlers. There were warnings that without a quick transfer in power the African nationalism would undermine British rule. Understanding that in order to encourage a collaboration from the African governments they would need to decolonize and leave them to self rule which is thought to be a good substitute for direct and total control of the area.

Background / Harold Macmillan was the Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. He presided over a time of prosperity and the easing of Cold War tensions. The dissolution of the British Empire was quite rapid in comparison to others in our known history, such as the Roman or Ottoman Empires.

At the time of the collapse the Empire embodied the direct rule of foreign territories as an integral part of a supra-national enterprise, called the British Empire. Britain, as the colonizing power, directly controlled territories, in the partial, or complete, disregard to the will of the indigenous peoples of those territories, to rule themselves. This was especially true in the British Empire of Africa, which was falling apart in the years 1957–1965. during the time when the United Kingdom was under Macmillan’s leadership.

By 1960 Macmillan’s Conservative government was becoming worried about the effects of violent confrontations with the African nationalism in the Belgian Congo and French Algeria. This became a concern because the Conservatives were in fear of this violent activity spilling over into British colonies. This is when Macmillan goes to Africa to circulate and delivers his famous speech “Wind of Change”, which is named for its famous line “The wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact , an our national policies must take account of it.”

Following this speech with surprising speed Iain Macleod, Colonial Secretary in 1959-61 increased the original timetable for independence in East Africa by an entire decade. Independence was granted to Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962 and Kenya in 1963.

The Empire had begun its dissolution after the end of the Second World War. Many had come to the conclusion that running the empire had become more trouble than it was worth. There were many

Then known as Cassius Clay, the future 3-Time Heavyweight World Champion began...

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01 January

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While Hunt negotiated with Bidwills, similar offers were made by Bud Adams, Bob Howsam, and Max Winter.

When Hunt, Adams, and Howsam were unable to secure a controlling interest in the Chicago Cardinals, they approached NFL commissioner Bert Bell and proposed the addition of expansion teams.

Bell, wary of expanding the 12-team league and risking its newfound success, rejected the offer. On his return flight to Dallas, Hunt conceived the idea of an entirely new league and decided to contact the others who had shown interest in purchasing the Cardinals. He contacted Adams, Howsam, and Winter (as well as Winter’s business partner, Bill Boyer) to gauge their interest in starting a new league. Hunt’s first meeting with Adams was held in March 1959. Hunt, who felt a regional rivalry would be critical for the success of the new league, convinced Adams to join and found his team in Houston. Hunt next secured an agreement from Howsam to bring a team to Denver, Colorado.

After Winter and Boyer agreed to start a team in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the new league had its first four teams. Hunt then approached Willard Rhodes, who hoped to bring pro football to Seattle, Washington. However, the University of Washington was unwilling to let the fledgling league use Husky Stadium, probably due to the excessive wear and tear that would have caused to the facility’s grass surface. With no place for his team to play, Rhodes’ effort came to nothing. Hunt also sought franchises in Los Angeles, California and New York City. During the summer of 1959 he sought the blessings of the NFL for his nascent league, as he did not seek a potentially costly rivalry. Within weeks of the July 1959 announcement of the league’s formation, Hunt received commitments from Barron Hilton and Harry Wismer to bring teams to Los Angeles and New York, respectively.

JANUARY 21

A MINE COLLAPSES AT COALBROOK, SOUTH AFRICA, KILLING 500 MINERS. Coalbrook, South Africa / The biggest mine disaster in South African history was also one of the deadliest in the world. On Jan. 21, 1960, a rock fall in a section of the mine trapped 437 miners.

Of those casualties, 417 succumbed to methane poisoning. One of the problems was that there wasn’t a drill capable of cutting a large enough hole for the men to escape. After the disaster, the country’s mining authority purchased suitable rescue drilling equipment. There was outcry after the accident when it was reported that some miners had fled to the entrance at the first falling rock, but were forced back into the mine by supervisors. Because of the racial inequality in the country, white miners’ widows received more compensation than the Bantu widows.

JANUARY 22

IN FRANCE, PRESIDENT CHARLES DE GAULLE FIRES JACQUES MASSU, THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE FRENCH TROOPS IN ALGERIA.

JANUARY 28

THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE ANNOUNCED EXPANSION TEAMS FOR DALLAS TO START IN THE 1960 NFL SEASON AND MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL FOR 1961 NFL SEASON.

1958–62: Founding of the Fifth Republic / In the November 1958 elections, de Gaulle and his supporters (initially organised in the Union pour la Nouvelle République-Union Démocratique du Travail, then the Union des Démocrates pour la Vème République, and later still the Union des Démocrates pour la République, UDR) won a comfortable majority. In December, de Gaulle was elected President by the electoral college with 78% of the vote, and inaugurated in January 1959.

American Football League / The American Football League (AFL) was a major American Professional Football league that operated from 1960 until 1969, when it merged with the National Football League (NFL). The upstart AFL operated in direct competition with the more established NFL throughout its existence.

He oversaw tough economic measures to revitalise the country, including the issuing of a new franc (worth 100 old francs). Internationally, he rebuffed both the United States and the Soviet Union, pushing for an independent France with its own nuclear weapons, and strongly encouraged a “Free Europe”, believing that a confederation of all European nations would restore the past glories of the great European empires.

The AFL was created by a number of owners who had been refused NFL expansion franchises or had minor shares of NFL franchises. The AFL’s original lineup saw an Eastern division of the New York Titans, Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills and the Houston Oilers along with a Western division of the Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, and Dallas Texans. The league first gained attention by signing 75% of the NFL’s first-round draft choices in 1960, including Houston’s successful signing of All-American Billy Cannon.

He set about building Franco-German cooperation as the cornerstone of the European Economic Community (EEC), paying the first state visit to Germany by a French head of state since Napoleon. In January 1963, Germany and France signed a treaty of friendship, the Élysée Treaty. France also reduced its dollar reserves, trading them for gold from the U.S. government, thereby reducing American economic influence abroad.

League history / During the 1950s, the National Football League had grown to rival Major League Baseball as one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the United States. One franchise that did not share in this newfound success of the league was the Chicago Cardinals, owned by the Bidwill family, who had become overshadowed by the more popular Chicago Bears. The Bidwills hoped to relocate their franchise, preferably to St. Louis but could not come to terms with the league on a relocation fee. Needing cash, the Bidwills began entertaining offers from would-be investors, and one of the men who approached the Bidwills was Lamar Hunt, son and heir of Texas millionaire oilman H. L. Hunt.

On 23 November 1959, in a speech in Strasbourg, de Gaulle announced his vision for Europe: Oui, c’est l’Europe, depuis l’Atlantique jusqu’à l’Oural, c’est toute l’Europe, qui décidera du destin du monde. (“Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.”)

His expression, “Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals”, has often been cited throughout the history of European integration. It became, for the next ten years, a favourite political rallying cry of de Gaulle’s. His vision stood in contrast to the Atlanticism of the United States and Britain, preferring instead a Europe that would act as a third pole between the United States and the Soviet Union.

By including in his ideal of Europe all the territory up to the Urals, de Gaulle was implicitly offering détente to the Soviets.

Hunt offered to buy the Cardinals and move them to Dallas, Texas, where he had grown up. However, these negotiations came to nothing, since the Bidwills insisted on retaining a controlling interest in the franchise and were unwilling move their team to a city where a previous NFL franchise had failed in 1952.

Algeria / Upon becoming president, de Gaulle was faced with the urgent task of finding a way to bring to an end the bloody and divisive war in Algeria.

His intentions were obscure. He had immediately visited Algeria and declared, Je vous ai compris – ‘I have understood you’, and each competing interest had wished to believe it was them that he had understood. Whatever his intentions, “he soon came to realize that Algerian independence was inevitable.” French left-wingers were in favour of granting independence to Algeria and urged him to seek a way to achieve peace while, at the same time, avoiding a French loss of face. Although the military’s near-coup had contributed to his return to power, de Gaulle soon ordered all officers to quit the rebellious Committees of Public Safety.

Such actions greatly angered the French settlers and their military supporters.

He was forced to suppress two uprisings in Algeria

by French settlers and troops, in the second of which (the Generals’ Putsch in April 1961) France herself was again threatened with invasion by rebel paratroops. De Gaulle’s government also covered up the Paris massacre of 1961, issued under the orders of the police prefect Maurice Papon.

He was also targeted by the settlers’ resistance group Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) and several assassination attempts were made on him; the most famous is that of 22 August 1962, when he and his wife narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when their Citroën DS was targeted by machine gun fire arranged by Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry at Petit-Clamart. Visitors to the French capital around this time heard, “the eerie sounds of car horns, beating out the five count of Al-gé-rie-Fran-çaise”.

After a referendum on Algerian self-determination carried out in 1961, de Gaulle arranged a ceasefire in Algeria with the March 1962 Evian Accords, legitimated by another referendum a month later.

Although the Algerian issue was settled, Prime Minister Michel Debré resigned over the final settlement and was replaced with Georges Pompidou on 14 April 1962. France recognised Algerian independence on 3 July 1962, while an amnesty was belatedly issued covering all crimes committed during the war, including the genocide against the Harkis. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 French settlers left the country. After 5 July, the exodus accelerated in the wake of the French deaths during the Oran massacre of 1962. Historian Julian Jackson : “The Pieds-Noirs peddled a fantasy of a harmonious country of Muslims and Europeans, but the history of the French in Algeria had always been one of violence, expropriation and exploitation. After the terrorist organisation OAS adopted a kind of scorched earth policy toward the end, it was made certain the Pieds-Noirs could not stay on in Algeria – [there followed] an influx of a million embittered and dispossessed refugees into France – where they now formed a reservoir of passionate, right-wing, anti-Gaullism.”

JANUARY 24

A MAJOR INSURRECTION OCCURS IN ALGIERS AGAINST FRENCH COLONIAL POLICY. Algerian War / Algiers also played a pivotal role in the Algerian War (1954–1962), particularly during the Battle of Algiers when the 10th Parachute Division of the French Army, starting on January 7, 1957, and on the orders of then French Minister of Justice François Mitterrand (who authorized any means “to eliminate the insurrectionists”), led attacks against the Algerian fighters for independence. Algiers remains marked by this battle, which was characterized by merciless fighting between Algerian forces who, on the one hand, resorted to attacking the French civilians and proFrench Algerians, and the French Army who, on the other, carried out a bloody repression including the quasi-systematic use of torture on protesters of the colonial order. The demonstrations of May 13 during the crisis of 1958 provoked the fall of the Fourth Republic in France, as well as the return of General de Gaulle to power.

Independence / Algeria achieved independence on July 5, 1962. Run by the FLN that had secured independence, Algiers became a member of NonAligned Movement during the Cold War. In October 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Algiers was the site of demonstrations demanding the end of the single party system and the creation of a real democracy baptized the “Spring of Algiers”. The demonstrators were repressed by the authorities (more than 300 dead), but the movement constituted a turning point in the political history of modern Algeria.

In 1989, a new constitution was adopted that put an end to the reign of the single party and saw the creation of more than fifty political parties, as well as official freedom of the press.

Crisis of the 1990s / The city became the theatre of many political demonstrations of all descriptions until 1992. In 1991, a political entity dominated by religious conservatives called the Islamic Salvation Front engaged in a political test of wills with the authorities. In the 1992 elections for the Algerian National Assembly, the Islamists garnered a large amount of support in the first round, helped by a massive abstention from disillusioned Algerian voters by the turn of events. Fearing an eventual win by the Islamists, the army cancelled the election process, setting off a civil war between the State and armed religious conservatives which would last for a decade.

On December 11, 2007, two car bombs exploded in Algiers. One bomb targeted two United Nations buildings and the other targeted a government building housing the Supreme Court. The death toll is at least 62, with over two hundred injured in the attacks. However, only 26 remained hospitalized the following day. As of 2008, it is speculated that the attack was carried out by the Al Qaida cell within the city.

Indigenous terrorist groups have been actively operating in Algeria since around 2002.

JANUARY 30

THE AFRICAN NATIONAL PARTY IS FOUNDED IN CHAD, THROUGH THE MERGER OF TRADITIONALIST PARTIES. African National Party / was a political party in Chad. PNA was founded on January 30, 1960, through the merger remnants of four parties based in the Muslim-dominated northern Chad; African Socialist Movement, Chadian Social Action, Independent Democratic Union of Chad and Grouping of Rural and Independent Chadians. Initially, PNA held 25 seats in the National Assembly, but the party suffered from defections to the Chadian Progressive Party, first the number of MPs went down to 17 and then to ten. In April 1961 PNA merged with the Chadian Progressive Party at a Unity Congress in Abéché, forming the Union for the Progress of Chad (UPT).

This alliance did however become short-lived, as PNA issued their own candidate lists for elections.

In 1961 PNA leaders were arrested, in January 1962 the party was banned. In 1963, the PNA leader Djbrinne Kherallah declared that the PNA would not agree to dissolve itself.

After World War II, France granted Chad the status of overseas territory and its inhabitants the right to elect representatives to the French National Assembly and a Chadian assembly. The largest political party was the Chadian Progressive Party (PPT), based in the southern half of the colony.

Chad was granted independence on 11 August 1960 with the PPT’s leader, François Tombalbaye, as its first president. Two years later, Tombalbaye banned opposition parties and established a one-party system. Tombalbaye’s autocratic rule and insensitive mismanagement exacerbated interethnic tensions. In 1965 Muslims began a civil war. Tombalbaye was overthrown and killed in 1975, but the insurgency continued. his march to greatness at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Just graduated from high school,...

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02 January

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a distinguished, powerful figure from the western world admonishing the practices and encouraging the black nationalists the achieve equality, but it still was not as ground breaking or immediately effective as was the implied intent.[8] There was some belief that the policy outlined in the speech was seen as ‘British abdication in Africa’ and ‘the cynical abandonment of white settlers’.[3] Not everyone felt that it was the right move for the nation to make. However, there was a slightly ambiguous reaction from some of the Black Nationalists; they had been prevented from meeting Macmillan – assumingly by Verwoerd – over the course of his visit and were skeptical about his speech at first.

Small groups of ANC supporters gathered in both Johannesburg and Cape Town and stood in silence while holding placards with urgings directed at Macmillan. They wanted him to talk with Congress leaders, and reached out to him with banners saying: ‘Mac, Verwoerd is not our leader.’ It is even said that Mandela thought the speech was ‘terrific’ and he even made a speech in 1996 that specifically recalled this very address when he spoke to the British parliament in Westminster Hall. One ANC leader named Luthuli noted that in his speech Harold gave African people ‘some inspiration and hope.’

FEBRUARY 03

PRIME MINISTER OF THE UNITED KINGDOM HAROLD MACMILLAN MAKES THE WIND OF CHANGE SPEECH TO THE SOUTH AFRICAN PARLIAMENT IN CAPE TOWN. The original delivery and its impact in South Africa / The year 1960 was rife with change. Starting with the surprising announcement by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd that a referendum would be held in regards to whether South Africa should become a republic; After that were Macmillan’s speech on 3 February, an attempt was made on Verwoerd’s life on 9 April, and the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned in a state of emergency, along with other controversies. Harold Macmillan did not solely compose the speech commonly known as the “Winds of Change”; he had input from numerous friends and colleagues who helped derive the perfect wording for the delicate situation.

The Prime Minister wanted to separate the British Nation, but also inspire the black nationalists there to pursue their freedom and equality subtly. The other hidden motive is that during this period there was much dissent amongst the powerful western nations over the level of involvement and the continued interference of Britain in her colonies. By separating themselves from the archaic practices that were condemned by their powerful allies they opened themselves up to more political opportunity. This was a bold attempt to address multiple parties and interests at once.

Before he delivered the speech, Macmillan went on a 6 week tour of the African nation that began on 5 January. He began with Ghana, Nigeria, Rhodesia & Nyasaland and then South Africa where the meeting finally happened with the South African Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.

Macmillan tried to explain the necessity of change brought upon them by the two world wars. When Harold Macmillan delivered his speech, it was done for multiple reasons. Although the main subject matter of the speech is relating to the separation of Britain from its South African colonies, it also made reference to their discontent with the apartheid and it held positive political results for the British nation. The speech held promise of major policy change on the topic of their decolonization, and was actually delivered twice in two different locations. First it was done in Ghana, but there was no press coverage and few people even attended the event in Accra. The second, more famous, telling was on 3 February in Cape Town and was met with very mixed reviews.

If the speech would be judged on its quality of deliverance and content it would be considered a success. When considering if this speech was successful one must place it next to its objectives. The speech did lay down a relatively clear understanding of Britain’s intended exit as a colonial power in Africa, so in the larger scheme it achieved its purpose. However, when considering there is indication that Macmillan’s intent was to sway white South African’s to abandon Verwoerd’s apartheid dogma, that part of the speech was a failure. It was an important moment to have such

Some people indicated that the British Prime Minister was very nervous for the entire speech, with obvious struggle he would turn the pages. This could be because he knowingly was presenting a speech that he had intentionally withheld from the South African Prime Minister before. Macmillan had declined giving Verwoerd an advance copy, and merely summed up the main content to him. When the speech was complete there was visible shock on Verwoerd’s face. He apparently leapt up from his seat and immediately responded to the British Prime Minister. He was reportedly calm, and collected when he gave his response – something that was widely admired by the public.

He had to save face when Macmillan had dropped a ticking time bomb into speech, yet he managed to respond quickly and well in a game of words he was not accustomed to. He famously responded by saying: “there must not only be justice to the Black man in Africa, but also to the White man”, and he had strong political truth in this.[8] For these Europeans there had no real other home, for Africa was their home now too; they also were a strong stance against communism, for their ways were grounded in Christian values. A writer on the subject of this speech named Saul Dubow stated that “The unintended effect of the speech was to help empower Verwoerd by reinforcing his dominance over domestic politics and by assisting him make two hitherto separate strands of his political career seem mutually reinforcing: republican nationalism on the one hand and apartheid ideology on the other.”

CERN following international collaborations. It is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The main site at Meyrin has a large computer centre containing powerful data-processing facilities, primarily for experimental-data analysis; because of the need to make these facilities available to researchers elsewhere, it has historically been a major wide area networking hub.

FEBRUARY 10

A CONFERENCE ABOUT THE PROPOSED INDEPENDENCE OF THE BELGIAN CONGO BEGINS IN BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

FEBRUARY 09

Yielding to international pressure, in 1908 the Belgian parliament annexed the CFS as the Belgian Congo, effectively removing Leopold from power.

Just prior to releasing sovereignty over the CFS, Leopold destroyed all evidence of his activities in the CFS, including the archives of its Departments of Finance and the Interior. The Belgian parliament refused to hold any formal commission of inquiry into the human rights abuses that had occurred in the CFS. Over the next few decades, inhumane practices in the Belgian Congo continued and a huge number of Congolese remained enslaved.

By 1959, Belgium power began to erode due to a series of riots in Leopoldville (today Kinshasa). The Congo was emancipated from Belgium on June 30, 1960, and the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo was established.

JOANNE WOODWARD RECEIVES THE FIRST STAR ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. Woodward’s mother was such a film fan that mother and daughter were in the crowd of fans at the premiere of “Gone With the Wind” in Atlanta in 1939. The then-9-year-old Woodward rushed into the caravan of stars and plopped herself in the lap of Laurence Olivier, who was the boyfriend and future husband of star, Vivien Leigh. Ironically, nearly 40 years later the two starred in the NBC adaptation of William Inge’s play, “Come Back, Little Sheba.” Olivier even remembered the incident when Woodward told him of their brief encounter.

From 1885 to 1908, it is estimated that the Congolese native population decreased by about ten million people. Historian Adam Hochshild identifies a number of causes for this loss under Leopold’s reign—murder, starvation, exhaustion and exposure, disease, and plummeting birth rates. Congolese historian Ndaywel e Nziem estimates the death toll at thirteen million. Leopold capitalized on the vast wealth extracted in ivory and rubber during his twenty-three year reign of terror in the CFS. He spent some of this wealth by constructing grand palaces and monuments including the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. Ironically, Leopold never visited the kingdom in which he committed such atrocities, to witness the tragedy of his greed.

FEBRUARY 11

THE N CLASS BLIMP ZPG-3W OF THE U.S. NAVY IS DESTROYED DURING A STORM OVER MASSACHUSETTS. The N-Class, or as popularly known, the Nan ship, was a line of non-rigid airships built by the Goodyear Aircraft Company of Akron, Ohio for the US Navy. This line of airships was developed through many versions and assigned various designators as the airship designation system changed in the post World War II era. These versions included airships configured for both anti-submarine warfare and airborne early warning (AEW) missions. The initial version, designated ZPN-1, was a follow-on to the M-class blimp for patrol missions. The Nan ship used a significantly larger envelope than the M-ship although their overall lengths were similar.

Two Wright radial air-cooled engines powered the N-Class blimps.

The actress won numerous beauty contests as a teenager and got her first taste for acting in high school. She attended Louisiana State University for two years, eventually going to New York City where she studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood playhouse and also at the Actors Studio.

She fell in love with Paul Newman while they were both on Broadway in William Inge’s “Picnic” in 1953. Newman was married at the time; he finally got a divorced and the two married in 1958.

After appearing on several live anthology dramas on TV, Woodward made her film debut in 1955’s Civil War western, “Count Three and Pray,” and won a best actress Oscar for her riveting turn as a woman with multiple personalities in 1957’s “The Three Faces of Eve.”

FEBRUARY 05

THE FIRST CERN PARTICLE ACCELERATOR BECOMES OPERATIONAL IN GENEVA, SWITZERLAND. The European Organization for Nuclear Research / is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. Established in 1954, the organization is based in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border, (46°14′3″N 6°3′19″E) and has 20 European member states.

The term CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which employs just under 2,400 full-time employees, 1,500 part-time employees, and hosts some 10,000 visiting scientists and engineers, representing 608 universities and research facilities and 113 nationalities.[citation needed] CERN’s main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research - as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at

The ZPG-3W was the last of the airships built for the U.S. Navy. The July 6, 1960, crash of a Lakehurst-based airship east of Long Beach Island killed 18 sailors, a loss that added pressure on the program. The Navy decommissioned its airship units at Naval Air Station Glynco, Brunswick, Georgia, and at Lakehurst on Oct. 31, 1961. On Aug. 31, 1962, the last two ZPG-3W ships made a ceremonial last flight over Lakehurst — the base log noted, “This flight terminates operation of non-rigid airships at Lakehurst,” Steingold said.

In 1958, she made her first film with Newman, “The Long, Hot Summer.” Woodward and Newman made several more films but they paled in comparison to their first. However, they created movie magic with the 1968 drama, “Rachel, Rachel,” Newman’s directorial debut. Woodward received her second best actress nomination for her performance as a 35-year-old virgin.

During the 1970s, the mother of three girls continued to act in films and in TV, earning another best actress Oscar nomination for her turn as a bored housewife in 1973’s “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams” and earning her first Emmy for 1978’s “See How She Runs,” as a housewife and mother who trains for the Boston Marathon. She picked up another Emmy as a college professor with Alzheimer’s in 1985’s “Do You Remember Love.”

Woodward earned her final Oscar nomination for James Ivory’s 1990 drama, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” which starred Newman as her husband. Her last feature film role was as Tom Hanks’ mother in 1993’s “Philadelphia.”

The specially designed and built AN/APS-70 Radar with its massive 42 ft (12.8 m) internal antenna was the best airborne radar system built for detecting other aircraft because its low frequency penetrated weather and showed only the more electronically visible returns. A large radome on top of the envelope held the height finding radar.

Under the designation system established in April 1947 the first N-class airships were given the Navy designation of ZPN-1, (Z = lighter-than-air; P = patrol; N = type/class). In April 1954, the designation system was changed to mimic that used for heavier-than-air aircraft.

Her final on-screen appearance with Newman was in HBO’s 2005 miniseries, “Empire Falls,” for which she received an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination as a town matriarch and owner of a diner.

Newman died three years later of lung cancer.

the 18 year old became known as “The Mayor of Olympic Village” because...

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He said: “Our bedroom overlooks the scene of the crash and I had just gone to bed when I heard a crash and a blinding light lit up the bedroom.

FEBRUARY 23

DEMOLITION OF EBBETS FIELD, FORMER HOME OF BASEBALL’S DODGERS, COMMENCES IN BROOKLYN, NY. Ebbets Field was but one of several historic major league ballparks demolished in the 1960s, but more mythology and nostalgia surrounds the stadium and its demise than possibly any other defunct ballpark.

FEBRUARY 13

Although the Soviet Union mastered H-bomb technology back in 1955, this “record” could have been meant as an answer to France emerging as a third Western force with nuclear power in the Cold War context.

FRANCE TESTS ITS FIRST ATOMIC BOMB - IN THE SAHARA DESERT OF ALGERIA.

Following the USSR, the United States reactivated its own atmospheric test program with a series of 40 explosions from April 1962 to November 1962. This series included two powerful H-bombs topping 7.45 Mt and 8.3 Mt.

Gerboise Bleue (“blue jerboa”) was the name of the first French nuclear test. It was an atomic bomb detonated in the middle of the Algerian Sahara desert on 13 February 1960, during the Algerian War (1954-62). General Pierre Marie Gallois was instrumental in the endeavour, and earned the nickname of père de la bombe A (“father of the A-bomb”).

China also launched its own nuclear program, resulting in the A-bomb “596” (22 kt) tested on 16 October 1964, and the H-bomb Test No. 6 (3.3 Mt), tested 17 June 1967.

In 1968, France detonated its first thermonuclear weapon, Canopus (2.6Mt), at the new facility at Fangataufa, a desert atoll in French Polynesia.

Gerboise is the jerboa, a desert rodent, while blue is the first color of the French tricolor flag. So the second and third bombs were named respectively “white” (Gerboise Blanche) and “red” (Gerboise Rouge).

In 1956, real estate developer Marvin Kratter bought Ebbets Field from O’Malley. He leased Ebbets Field back to O’Malley until the team left for Los Angeles after the 1957 season.

When the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, O’Malley urged Horace Stoneham, owner of the Dodgers’ long-time crosstown rivals, the New York Giants, to move west as well. Stoneham, who was having stadium difficulties of his own, agreed, and moved the Giants to San Francisco after the 1957 season.

That meant lights out for Ebbets Field, which was demolished, beginning on February 23, 1960.

FEBRUARY 18

THE 1960 WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES BEGIN AT THE SQUAW VALLEY SKI RESORT, IN PLACER COUNTY, CALIFORNIA.

With Gerboise Bleue, France became the fourth nuclear power, after the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom. Gerboise Bleue was by far the largest first test bomb up to that date, larger than the American “Trinity” (20 kt), the Soviet “RDS-1” (22 kt), or the British “Hurricane” (25 kt).

The yield was 70 kilotons, bigger than these three bombs put together. The second most powerful first-test bomb was “Chagai-I”, detonated by Pakistan in 1998, at 40 kilotons.

A great deal of history happened at Ebbets Field during its relatively short 45-year lifespan with the Dodgers. Of the many teams that uprooted in the 1950s and 1960s, the Dodgers have probably had the largest number of public laments over their fans’ heartbreak over losing their team. A couple of decades later, Roger Kahn’s acclaimed book The Boys of Summer and Frank Sinatra’s song “There Used to Be a Ballpark” mourned the loss of places like Ebbets Field, and of the attendant youthful innocence of fans and players alike. The story of Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles were also chronicled by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, figured into the plot of the film Field of Dreams, and were featured in an entire episode of Ken Burns’ public-television documentary Baseball, as well as a 2007 HBO documentary called Brooklyn Dodgers: Ghosts of Flatbush.

In comparison, Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, was 22 kilotons, one-third as powerful.

Only two other A-bombs tested in the Sahara facilities were more powerful: “Rubis” (<100 kt, 20 October 1963), and “Saphir” (<150 kt, 25 February 1965). Both were exploded underground at the Tan Afella facility.

Squaw Valley was once a mining boom town and was the biggest mining operations in the Lake Tahoe region. There were rumors that the mine was “salted” with ore brought in from Virginia City.

George Wharton James, Author of the book “The Lake of the Sky” doubts the mines were “salted” with ore and that the energetic prospector Knox started the mine with good faith. He writes all about the History of the Tahoe Region (pre 1915) in many of the chapters of his book. The Squaw Valley Mining boom was short lived and by 1863– 64 the valley soon lost almost all of its inhabitants to the Comstock lode in Virginia City, Nevada.

All other French atomic-bomb tests, including Canopus, were done in French Polynesia from 1966 to 1996. The last bomb, Xouthos (<120 kt), was exploded on 27 January 1996.

As an atomic yield cannot be precisely estimated, the French army planned an explosion between 60 and 70 kt. Gerboise Bleue was a total success, yielding the full designed power.

Due to increasing criticism, France stopped its atmospheric tests in the desert, and conducted further underground tests months after Algerian independence in 1962 according to secret agreements with the FLN.

By 1942 Wayne Poulsen, a former star skier from the University of Nevada, had acquired 2,000 acres (810 ha) in Squaw Valley from the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1946, Poulsen met Alex Cushing, a Harvard University-trained lawyer, with the political connections and access to capital that would make the resort a success. Shortly before opening in 1949, Poulsen and Cushing had a disagreement over the future of the resort, and eventually Cushing ended up controlling the Squaw Valley Ski Corporation.

From February 1960 to April 1961, France tested a limited number of atmospheric bombs in Reggane facility’s C.S.E.M. (Centre Saharien d’Expérimentations Militaires, or “Saharan Center for Military Experiments”): the four Gerboise bombs. Three of them were only engins de secours (“emergency devices”), with yields deliberately reduced to less than 5 kilotons. With the underground tests the sequence designation was changed to jewel names, starting in November 1961 with “Agathe” (agate; <20 kt). On 1 May 1962, during the second test, the “Beryl incident” (incident de Béryl) occurred, which was declassified many years later.

Though the 1960 Olympics had practically been promised to Innsbruck, Austria, Cushing went to Paris in 1955 with a scale model of his proposed Olympic site and persuaded the International Olympic Committee to choose Squaw Valley. It was the first Winter Olympics to be televised live and attracted millions of viewers.

Five months after the last Gerboise A-bomb, the Soviet Union responded by breaking its atmospheric tests moratorium, settled de facto since late 1958 with the United States and the United Kingdom. The USSR conducted many improvement tests, starting in September 1961 with a series of 136 large H-bombs. The series included the most powerful bomb ever tested, the 50-megaton (50,000 kt) “Tsar Bomba”, which was detonated over Novaya Zemlya.

Although the Squaw Valley Ski Resort remains the primary attraction in Olympic Valley, other yearround attractions and businesses have sprung up around the community. of his outgoing personality and larger-than-life spirit.

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O’Malley’s removal of the franchise from its historic home has been referred to by a federal judge as “one of the most notorious abandonments in the history of sports.”

FEBRUARY 26

A NEW YORK BOUND ALITALIA AIRLINER CRASHES INTO A CEMETERY AT SHANNON, IRELAND, SHORTLY AFTER TAKEOFF, KILLING 34 OF THE 52 PERSONS ON BOARD. Tragedy struck Ireland on this day 53 years ago, when a Alitalia plane bound for New York crashed in Shannon, Ireland, killing 34 of the 52 people on board.

The Douglas DC-7C aircraft stalled and crashed on takeoff in the early hours of February 26, 1960, before the plane could head across the Atlantic.

The plane had made a short stop in Ireland, having been en route from Naples and Rome to the U.S. city. Eyewitnesses said the plane, which was carrying 7,000 gallons of fuel, hit the ground 20 yards from Clonloghan Cemetery before ploughing through a wall, destroying around 20 headstones and coming to rest with only the tail section intact.

Others said there bodies ‘scattered all over the field’ after the crash.

One eyewitness, Jimmy Conheady, told Irish paper the Clare Champion, that passenger belongings and debris were strewn for three quarters of a mile.

“Our four children rushed into the room and my wife and I jumped to the window.

“There coming right towards us was the plane, which exploded after it hit the ditch of the second field. It had been coming to us until it exploded and then part of it swung to the right.”

The Pathe video above (which has no sound), shows the aftermath of the tragedy, with debris scattered everywhere and burning fuselage littering the landscape.

FEBRUARY 29

THE 1960 AGADIR EARTHQUAKE COMPLETELY DESTROYS THE TOWN OF AGADIR, MOROCCO. The night of February 29, 1960 was a typical winter night in Agadir, warm and clear, with the stars bright overhead. The hotels were filled with a gay tourist crowd, and the native Moroccans were celebrating and feasting in observance of the third night of Ramadan, the annual religious season which Mohammedans observe by fasting through the daylight hours and feasting by night. Only one factor distinguished this particular evening from the others of the season; slight earthquakes had been felt during the past week and a particularly strong shock had occurred this day, just before noon. This was a bit disquieting for a region in which common knowledge insisted earthquakes “never” occurred.

Then at 11:41 p.m. the earth gave a sudden violent lurch. A survivor said, “The earth was kicked from under us.” The ground motions lasted less than 15 seconds, but in this brief time the old masonry buildings in the Kasbah, Founti, and Yachech districts wobbled and collapsed, burying thousands of Moroccans in the rubble. In the Talborjt district, the newer, more modern appearing buildings developed cracks in the plaster exposing the weak masonry beneath; whole walls broke loose and crashed into the streets; complete buildings settled into rubble, burying thousands of Moroccans in the debris. In the New City and the Front-deMer, modern appearing reinforced concrete hotels and apartments revealed their deficiencies in design and construction, collapsing in total ruin and burying hundreds of Europeans in the heaps of twisted beams, columns, and shattered floor slabs. Within seconds entire districts of the city had been destroyed, thousands of people had been killed outright, and even more tragically, additional thousands had been buried alive in the debris to die agonizing deaths days later.

Rescue efforts were mobilized by many nations almost at once. The first news of the disaster was flashed to the outside world by the radios of Spanish fishing vessels anchored in Agadir harbor. French sailors and marines at the Agadir naval base were alerted by the ground motions and had rescue trucks on their way to the city within an hour. They were followed to the scene by Moroccan soldiers and French military personnel from other nearby bases. The next day King Mohammed V arrived to survey the magnitude of the disaster, and immediately placed his son, Prince Moulay Hassan in charge of all rescue operations.

The same day air lifts of rescuers and emergency supplies began to arrive from American bases in Morocco and Germany. The Spanish military forces organized their own air lift, sending in soldiers and additional supplies.

On March 3, Company A of the 79th Engineer Battalion, U.S. Army, arrived from Germany by air lift, with complete field and construction equipment, By this time very few persons were found still alive in the debris, and the heavy equipment was soon assigned to leveling the few walls which remained standing in the Kasbah and Yachech areas so that the decontamination crews could operate. The bulldozers also performed very effectively in opening the streets which has been thoroughly blocked with debris falling from the buildings. The principal rescue efforts were terminated on March 4, in favor of drastic measures for decontamination and disease prevention. However, a few people were found still alive after having been buried in the rubble for as long as ten days.

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However, due to commitments at Paramount and the filming schedule of his latest film, King Creole, Elvis had to personally write to the Memphis Draft Board to request a deferment. He explained to them that Paramount had already spent up to $350,000 on pre-production of the film, and that many jobs were dependent on him being able to complete filming, which was due to begin on January 13. They granted him an extension until the middle of March. When news of the extension broke, angry letters were sent to the Memphis Draft Board complaining about the “special treatment” that Presley was receiving. According to Milton Bowers, head of the draft board and angered by the public outcry, Presley “would have automatically gotten the extension [anyway] if he hadn’t been Elvis Presley the superstar”.

Korda became a fervant supporter of the Revolution. It gave him a chance to remove the “frivolity” from his art, and it reawakened concerns that had appeared when he snapped his earliest pictures. “I remember my first camera very well,” Korda says.

“Someone gave my father a little 35mm camera for a gift. I took it and carried it in my briefcase wherever I went.” During his rounds as a typewriter salesman in Havana, he started taking pictures “of things that troubled my heart” – particularly poverty-stricken children making toys out of whatever they could find in the street. “I realized I had to dedicate my work to this Revolution that promised to erase these inequalities.”

Worried that rock and roll music was a passing “fad”, Elvis wanted to make King Creole the best role he had ever acted. He knew that two years out of the limelight would mean hard work when he returned, and so he gave his all in that film to show the world that he had the potential to return as a serious, dramatic actor. Author Alanna Nash described it as “the performance that would forever define his potential”.

Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (he preferred to be called simply Korda, as the new documentary’s title suggests) was born in the El Cerro neighbourhood of Havana in 1928. His father was a telegraph operator for the railroads. His mother did the housework “like all Cuban women at that time.” Korda was their only child. He studied accounting and stenography, and when he left school he went to work for Sabatés SA, the Cuban arm of Procter and Gamble. Korda handled the company’s advertising.

Then he went to work selling cash registers and typewriters for Remington Rand, another North American conglomerate.

MARCH O5

ALBERTO KORDA TAKES HIS ICONIC PHOTOGRAPH OF CHE GUEVARA, GUERRILLERO HEROICO, IN HAVANA.

MARCH 03

ELVIS PRESLEY RETURNS HOME FROM GERMANY, AFTER BEING AWAY ON DUTY FOR 2 YEARS. In early 1959, after complaints from other guests about the behavior of Elvis and his friends, the group left the Grunewald Hotel and moved to a five bedroom house nearby. Fans would congregate outside the house to see Elvis as he came and went to maneuvers, and a sign was put up stating that autographs would be given between 7.30 and 8.00pm.

Although Elvis’s manager had forbidden him from performing while in the army, pressure from RCA for him to record new material led to Parker sending a microphone and a tape recorder to Germany.

Elvis had recorded a handful of songs before he left for Germany to cover his time away, but RCA was worried that they would run out of material before March 1960. In a letter to his client, Parker explained that recordings of Elvis with just a piano for accompaniment, singing gospel songs would be good enough; his fans would just want to hear him sing anything. Elvis used the recorder to mess around with friends and family, singing mainly gospel and current hits, but none of these recordings were sent back for release by RCA. Decades later these recordings would be released officially on titles such as Private Presley and Home Recordings. In June, with 15 days leave to enjoy, Elvis and his friends traveled to Munich and Paris. Two days in Munich were followed by over a week of partying in Paris where, on several occasions, Elvis would invite the whole chorus line of girls from The 4’o Clock club back to his hotel.

Around this time Elvis’s father,Vernon, had been getting close to a woman named Dee Stanley, the wife of army sergeant Bill Stanley. Originally Dee had written to Elvis inviting him to dinner. She had seen him live during one of his earliest performances in the fifties, and she was keen to meet a star of his stature. Elvis, not interested in dinner with someone he knew was considerably older than he, sent his father in his place.

Most biographers state that Dee was already in the process of divorcing her husband when she met Vernon, but some others claim that Vernon had gotten to know both of them together, and was even asked by Bill to help him save his marriage.

When Elvis heard of the relationship between his father and Dee he flew into a rage; in his mind his father had no business to be setting up with another woman so close after the death of Gladys.

Dee returned to the USA in the summer of 1959, closely followed by Vernon, and the pair returned to Germany together. Close friends of Elvis have stated that Bill received a “handsome payoff” for his signature on the divorce papers. Dee and Vernon would eventually marry in 1960, with her children becoming stepbrothers to Elvis. Although Elvis never liked Dee, he became very close to her young children and welcomed them to his home as the brothers he never had; in later years they would be employed as bodyguards and drivers.

MARCH 05

ELVIS PRESLEY RECEIVES HIS HONORABLE DISCHARGE FROM THE U.S. ARMY. Before entering the Army Presley had caused national outrage with his sexually charged performances and rock and roll music. Many parents, religious leaders, and teachers groups saw his draft, removing him from public view, as a positive thing. Despite being offered the chance to enlist in Special Services to entertain the troops and live in priority housing, Presley decided to serve as a regular soldier. This earned him the respect of many of his fellow soldiers and people back home who had previously viewed him in a negative light.

During his service Presley’s life was affected in several ways. First, his mother, Gladys, died of a heart attack brought on by acute hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. Presley was deeply affected by her death and would never fully recover.

Secondly, during his time in Germany, he would meet his future wife Priscilla Beaulieu. Also, while in Germany, Presley began to become dependent on uppers and downers. These drugs, and more importantly the drugs they would lead onto, would eventually contribute to Presley’s death at age 42.

After his release from the army Presley found a new fan base among an older age group, thanks in part to his army career and releases of ballads over rock and roll songs.

Presley was originally scheduled to be inducted on January 20, 1958.

There’s a good chance Alberto Korda was responsible for the photos you’ve seen from the early, heady days of the Cuban Revolution – flag-waving campesinos, rifle-wielding barbudos, but also (and especially) Fidel and Che in their off-hours, fishing, enjoying a smoke, playing a legendary round of golf in battle fatigues at what was formerly a country club for Havana’s elite. The world’s most famous Cuban photographer snapped an estimated 55,000 Revolution-themed photos – quite an achievement in those pre-digital days, and in a place where photographic equipment and supplies weren’t always readily available. But his real achievement, the one for which he will always be remembered, was his messianic Che Guevara image, which Korda entitled Guerrillero Heroico.

MARCH 06

THE UNITED STATES ANNOUNCES THAT 3,500 AMERICAN SOLDIERS WILL BE SENT TO VIETNAM. With help from the United States, South Vietnam carried out the election only in South Vietnam rather than countrywide. After eliminating most of his rivals, Ngo Dinh Diem was elected. His leadership, however, proved so horrible that he was killed in 1963 during a coup supported by the United States. Since Diem had alienated many South Vietnamese during his tenure, communist sympathizers in South Vietnam established the National Liberation Front (NLF), also known as the Viet Cong, in 1960 to use guerrilla warfare against the South Vietnamese.

“It’s incredible,” the photographer recalls in Simply Korda, a new documentary that premiered in March in Havana to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Korda’s iconic Che photo. “That has become the most reproduced image in the history of photography. And it was snapped on the spur of the moment, a coincidence.”

That coincidence happened on March 5, 1960. The previous day a French boat, La Coubre, exploded in Havana’s port loaded with munitions destined for the nascent Cuban Revolution. At least 75 people were killed. Che, who had personally provided medical treatment to victims of the blast, was among the crowd at the funeral march along Calle 23, and Korda snapped just two shots of him with his Leica M2.

MARCH 06

THE CANTON OF GENEVA IN SWITZERLAND GIVES WOMEN THE RIGHT TO VOTE.

Fifty years later Korda’s Guerrillero Heroico image has become the shot seen round the world, and Cuban director Roberto Chile brings the man and his work into sharp focus. Simply Korda, like the same director’s 2002 Fidel documentary, is an evocative portrait that dispenses with sugarcoating in favour of facts. The film is based on an interview that took place four months prior to Korda’s death and has never before been shown.

“I’ve dedicated my photography to what I love,” Korda tells Chile matter-of-factly. “I’m not any kind of genius. And one of my first interests and loves in my life was the beauty of women, right?”

By giving voters the final say on legislation, Switzerland’s system of direct democracy kept women out, but at the same time the extensive autonomy of even the smallest administrative units gave them their chance to break in to political life. It was a tiny commune in Canton Valais that, in 1957, was the first to allow its women members to vote.

Several cantons gradually followed suit, and in the 1960s women started occupying more and more important positions in local parliaments and governments. In 1968 Geneva, then the country’s third largest city, had a woman mayor - but she still couldn’t vote in federal elections.

So the documentary gives us a young, pre-revolutionary Korda snapping studio pictures of models holding bows and arrows and pussycats. He’s even in some of these advertising photos himself, with his yachtsman’s cap and debonair pencil moustache. He announces, “I was the creator of fashion photography in Cuba because, until this very day, I love the female figure.” Then we see a series of sexy, swimsuit shots.

This advance did not prevent Switzerland from suggesting that when it signed the human rights convention of the Council of Europe, it should opt out of those parts calling for sexual equality. The uproar this provoked forced the government to revise its position. A new referendum was put to the country.

So how did Korda make the transition when the Revolution came to town? Seamlessly, it turns out.

“The Cuban Revolution was victorious, it was run by men, and it was even more beautiful than the beauty of women! So,” Korda says with the grand arm gestures of a man still amazed by the turn of history, “I devoted myself to [The Revolution.]”

And beards and berets blossomed on magazine pages and in university dorm rooms.

The result: on February 7th 1971 Swiss males, by a two thirds majority, finally gave their female compatriots their full federal voting rights.

Already a national champion in both AAU and Golden Gloves competitions, the Louisville,...

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The Commission finds that the police deliberately opened fire on an unarmed crowd that had gathered peacefully at Sharpville on 21 March 1960 to protest against the pass laws. The Commission finds further that the SAP (South African Police) failed to give the crowd an order to disperse before they began firing and that they continued to fire upon the fleeing crowd, resulting in hundreds of people being shot in the back. As a result of the excessive force used, 69 people were killed and more than 300 injured. The Commission finds further that the police failed to facilitate access to medical and/or other assistance to those who were wounded immediately after the march.

The Commission finds that many of the participants in the march were apolitical, women and unarmed, and had attended the march because they were opposed to the pass laws. The Commission finds, therefore, that many of the people fired upon and injured in the march were not politicised members of any political party, but merely persons opposed to carrying a pass.

MARCH 17

THE N CLASS BLIMP ZPG-3W OF THE U.S. NAVY IS DESTROYED DURING A STORM OVER MASSACHUSETTS.

Below, please see a promotional announcement for the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular (it helpfully notes that they are “a band from the Planet Earth,” and that every image you see begins with “a single beam of light”).

MARCH 23

SOVIET PREMIER NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV MEETS FRENCH PRESIDENT CHARLES DE GAULLE IN PARIS.

decrying colonialism. Infuriated by a statement of the Filipino delegate Lorenzo Sumulong which charged the Soviets with employing a double standard by decrying colonialism while dominating Eastern Europe, Khrushchev demanded the right to reply immediately, and accused Sumulong of being “a fawning lackey of the American imperialists”. Sumulong resumed his speech, and accused the Soviets of hypocrisy. Khrushchev yanked off his shoe and began banging it on his desk. This behavior by Khrushchev scandalized his delegation.

Khrushchev considered U.S. Vice President Nixon a hardliner, and was delighted by his defeat in the 1960 presidential election. He considered the victor, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, as a far more likely partner for détente, but was taken

The Commission finds that many of those injured in the march were placed under police guard in hospital as if they were convicted criminals and, upon release from hospital, were detained for long periods in prison before being formally charged. In the majority of instances when persons so detained appeared in court, the charges were withdrawn.

Flight 710 was a regularly scheduled flight departing Minneapolis-St. Paul to Miami with a stop at Chicago Midway Airport. Radio contact with the Indianapolis Control Center was made at approximately 3:00 pm local time. About 15 minutes later, witnesses reported seeing the airplane break into two pieces with the right wing falling as one piece and the remainder of the craft plunging to earth near Cannelton in southern Indiana.

The Commission finds the former state and the minister of police directly responsible for the commission of gross human rights violations in that excessive force was unnecessarily used to stop a gathering of unarmed people. Police failed to give an order to disperse and/or adequate time to disperse, relied on live ammunition rather than alternative methods of crowd dispersal and fired in a sustained manner into the back of the crowd, resulting in the death of sixty-nine people and the injury of more than 300.

At the time, investigators organized by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) worked on three major theories: - That a bomber blew up the plane and its passengers and crew members as they passed over southern Indiana on a Chicago-to-Miami flight.

- That violent air turbulence could have destroyed the craft, the first Electra purchased by Northwest and in service only seven months. Such turbulence was reported over southern Indiana at about the time of the crash.

- That the plane disintegrated through “metal fatigue” which had caused other crashes of highspeed airliners recently. The crash was the third Electra disaster in a little more than a year and the third unexplained accident in four months. It came within days of the Washington hearings on the death of 34 persons in a National Airlines plane crash near Bolivia, North Carolina (that disaster was later discovered to have been due to a bomb).

“Obviously, this plane broke up in the air,” CAB spokesman Edward Slattery said at the time. “It is too early to tell the cause of the tragedy, but we will investigate all possibilities, including a bomb.”

(Edwardsville Examiner, March 19, 1960) The New York Times reported that at 5:44 P.M., an hour and a half after news of the crash in the snow-covered Indiana-Kentucky border country, an anonymous caller told the Chicago police that a bomb had been placed aboard a plane at Midway Airport. The police searched the airport, but found nothing and said that they were convinced the call was a prank. The operator said she thought the caller was a young teenager.

MARCH 22

ARTHUR LEONARD SCHAWLOW & CHARLES HARD TOWNES RECEIVE THE FIRST PATENT FOR A LASER.

The craft’s fuselage plunged into an Ohio River country farm at a speed of over 600 miles per hour and disintegrated. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sent agents to the scene to determine whether there was any violation of Federal law.

Such an investigation would include the possibility of sabotage. State Police Sgt. Joe O’Brien said that the plane was last heard from over Scotland, Indiana, about 70 miles (110 km) from the crash site. He said the pilot, Capt. Edgar LaParle, had reported rumble and the weather was very muggy and cloudy.

This week marks is the fiftieth anniversary of the laser, or at least the first tested application of the technology. Though infrared lasers had been theorized since the mid-fifties and the term was coined in 1959, it wasn’t until 1960 that Theodore H. Maiman constructed the first functioning laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in California.

In case you’re wondering, it used a solid-state flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to produce red laser light, according to Wikipedia, which also notes that today is the exact fiftieth anniversary of the first application for a laser patent (by Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes). And in case you’re wondering what this post is doing on a culture blog, we’ll have to skip ahead a decade or so to the period where lasers became a central part of rock-and-roll. Bands like the Who and Pink Floyd, as well as a host of lesser-known acts, used lasers to keep audiences focussed on the visual aspects of their stage show along with the musical; in the mid-seventies, laser rock shows became something of a prog-rock or stoner rock cliché, though they also gave young teens renewed respect for their local planetariums (in the great sitcom “Freaks and Geeks,” there was an episode, “The Garage Door,” that revolved around going to see a Pink Floyd laser show).

MARCH 21

THE SHARPEVILLE MASSACRE IN SOUTH AFRICA RESULTS IN MORE THAN 69 DEAD, 300 INJURED.

A constant irritant in Soviet–U.S. relations was the overflight of the Soviet Union by American U-2 spy aircraft. On April 9, 1960, the U.S. resumed such flights after a lengthy break. The Soviets had protested the flights in the past, but had been ignored

by Washington. Content in what he thought was a strong personal relationship with Eisenhower, Khrushchev was confused and angered by the flights’ resumption, and concluded that they had been ordered by CIA Director Allen Dulles without the U.S. President’s knowledge. On May 1, a U-2 was shot down; its pilot, Francis Gary Powers captured alive. Believing Powers to have been killed, the U.S. announced that a weather plane had been lost near the Turkish-Soviet border. Khrushchev risked destroying the summit, due to start on May 16 in Paris, if he announced the shootdown, but would look weak in the eyes of his military and security forces if he did nothing. Finally, on May 5, Khrushchev announced the shootdown and Powers’ capture, blaming the overflight on “imperialist circles and militarists, whose stronghold is the Pentagon”, and suggesting the plane had been sent without Eisenhower’s knowledge.[198] Eisenhower could not have it thought that there were rogue elements in the Pentagon operating without his knowledge, and admitted that he had ordered the flights, calling them “a distasteful necessity”.

The admission stunned Khrushchev, and turned the U-2 affair from a possible triumph to a disaster for him, and he even appealed to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson for help.

Khrushchev was undecided what to do at the summit even as he boarded his flight to Paris. He finally decided, in consultation with his advisers on the plane and Presidium members in Moscow, to demand an apology from Eisenhower and a promise that there would be no further U-2 flights in Soviet airspace. Neither Eisenhower nor Khrushchev communicated with the other in the days before the summit, and at the summit, Khrushchev made his demands and stated that there was no purpose in the summit, which should be postponed for six to eight months, that is until after the 1960 United States presidential election.

The U.S. President offered no apology, but stated that the flights had been suspended and would not resume, and renewed his Open Skies proposal for mutual overflight rights. This was not enough for Khrushchev, who left the summit. Eisenhower accused Khrushchev “of sabotaging this meeting, on which so much of the hopes of the world have rested”. Eisenhower’s visit to the Soviet Union, for which the premier had even built a golf course so the U.S. President could enjoy his favorite sport, was canceled by Khrushchev.

Khrushchev made his second and final visit to the United States in September 1960. He had no invitation, but had appointed himself as head of the USSR’s UN delegation. He spent much of his time wooing the new Third World states which had recently become independent. The U.S. restricted him to the island of Manhattan, with visits to an estate owned by the USSR on Long Island. The notorious shoe-banging incident occurred during a debate on October 12 over a Soviet resolution

aback by the newly inaugurated U.S. President’s tough talk and actions in the early days of his administration. Khrushchev achieved a propaganda victory in April 1961 with the first manned spaceflight and Kennedy a defeat with the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. While Khrushchev had threatened to defend Cuba with Soviet missiles, the premier contented himself with after-the-fact aggressive remarks. The failure in Cuba led to Kennedy’s determination to make no concessions at the Vienna summit scheduled for June 3, 1961.

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev took a hard line, with Khrushchev demanding a treaty that would recognize the two German states and refusing to yield on the remaining issues obstructing a testban treaty. Kennedy on the other hand had been led to believe that the test-ban treaty could be concluded at the summit, and felt that a deal on Berlin had to await easing of East–West tensions.

Kennedy described negotiating with Khrushchev to his brother Robert as “like dealing with Dad. All give and no take.”

MARCH 29

TOM PILLIBI BY JACQUELINE BOYER WINS THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST 1960 FOR FRANCE.

She was born Jacqueline Ducos on the 23rd April, 1941 in Paris. Her parents were the singers, Jacques Pils and Lucienne Boyer. Jacques Pils had also participated in the contest, though with less success than his daughter, when he came last in the 1959 event for Monaco with the song Mon Ami Pierrot.

As well as being a singer, Jacqueline Boyer also established herself as an actress and appeared in several films. She enjoyed a successful career in Germany as well as her native France, and has peformed at many top venues, and is still recording and releasing albums.

After Teddy Scholten had given The Netherlands their second victory, with the song Een Beetje in 1959, the Dutch broadcaster NTS declined the opportunity to host the contest for what would have been the second time within three years.

The British broadcaster, the BBC had been the runner up in the 1959 contest, and they stepped forward to stage the 1960 event. It would turn out to be the first of eight contests to date that the BBC would be the host broadcaster.

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by Cecil B. DeMille, in 1925. After DeMille scored a hit with a remake of his own 1923 biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956), MGM decided to revive Ben-Hur as well. Wyler had worked on the set of DeMille’s 1925 version and the square-jawed Heston played Moses in The Ten Commandments.

APRIL 01

THE UNITED STATES LAUNCHES THE FIRST WEATHER SATELLITE, TIROS-1.

TIROS, for Television Infrared Observation Satellite, sent the very first TV images from space to the ground station at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The pictures clearly showed the New England coast and Canada’s Maritime Provinces north to the St. Lawrence River. The photos were airlifted pronto to Washington, D.C., to be presented to President Eisenhower.

Filmed on location in Italy, on a budget of some $15 million, Ben-Hur was the most expensive movie ever made up to that point. The film’s famous chariot race scene alone took three weeks to shoot and used some 15,000 extras. The setting for the race was constructed on 18 acres of back-lot space at Cinecitta Studios outside Rome. Aside from a few of the most daredevil stunts, Heston and Stephen Boyd (who played Messala, Judah Ben-Hur’s boyhood friend turned bitter enemy) did most of their own chariot driving. The payoff was big: Writing in his review of the film for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther called the scene a “stunning complex of mighty setting, thrilling action by horses and men, panoramic observation and overwhelming dramatic use of sound.”

At the 1960 Oscars, Ben-Hur swept 11 categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith, playing an Arab sheik who befriends Ben-Hur), Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction/Set Direction, Best Sound, Best Score, Best Film Editing, Best Color Costume Design and Best Special Effects. It was also nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Ben-Hur’s record number of Oscars still stands, although two films (1997’s Titanic and 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) have matched it.

TIROS-1 was an aluminum-and-stainless-steel drum measuring 42 inches in diameter, 19 inches high and weighing 270 pounds. An array of 9,200 solar cells powered its two TV cameras: one highres, one low-res. One antenna received control signals from ground stations, and another four transmitted TV images back to Earth. Two video recorders stored images when the satellite was out of range of ground stations.

the spoken verse singing: “You know someone said that the world’s a stage, and each must play a part.” “All the world’s a stage” is the phrase that begins a monologue from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII. Seeing the irony of his own lyrics, Elvis was again overtaken by laughter and barely recovered. The audience enjoyed the sincerity of the moment while Elvis regained his composure.

Meanwhile the band and backup singers continued to keep the song going. It is speculated that much of Elvis’ mirth derived from the solo backing singer; Cissy Houston, mother of Whitney Houston, whose obligato remained resolute throughout. To this, Elvis comes back just in time for the line: “And I had no cause to doubt you” followed by more laughter. So overtaken, Elvis encourages Cissy to “sing it, baby” drawing even more laughter which nearly brings the house down. In the end, the song is finished to a round of applause as Elvis says, “That’s it, man, fourteen years right down the drain...boy, I’ll tell ya. Fourteen years just shot right there.” The version is considered to be a popular underground classic, and was a UK Top 30 hit in 1982 after first being commercially released

by RCA in the 1980 box set Elvis Aaron Presley.

The same year, Peugeot debuted 10 hp (7.5 kW) and 14 hp (10.4 kW) fours, the larger based on the Type 153, and a 6-liter 25 hp (19 kW) sleeve valve six, as well as a new cyclecar, La Quadrilette.

During the ‘20s, Peugeot expanded, in 1926 splitting the cycle (pedal and motor) business off to form Cycles Peugeot, the consistently profitable cycle division seeking to free itself from the rather more cyclical auto business, and taking over the defunct Bellanger and De Dion companies in 1927.

1928 saw the introduction of the Type 183.

APRIL 13

UNITED STATES LAUNCHES NAVIGATION SATELLITE TRANSIT I-B.

According to Dr. Demento, who plays the version on his show, there is nothing on the label of the recording to indicate that it is anything other than an ordinary recording of the song--”People must have been surprised when they took it home and played it.”

In 1977, Presley again performed the song for the Elvis in Concert TV special. Similarly to 1969, he also appears to mess up the spoken interlude,

The polar-orbiting craft was not constantly pointed at earth and could only operate in daylight, so coverage was not continuous. It functioned for just 78 days, but it sent back thousands of pictures of cloud patterns forming and moving across the face of the planet. And it proved the theory that satellites could effectively survey global weather from space.

Development of the TRANSIT system began in 1958, and a prototype satellite, Transit 1A, was launched in September 1959. That satellite failed to reach orbit. A second satellite, Transit 1B, was successfully launched April 13, 1960, by a Thor-Ablestar rocket. The first successful tests of the system were made in 1960, and the system entered Naval service in 1964.

The Environmental Science Services Administration (predecessor of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) launched more TIROS satellites with NASA in the next few years. But it wasn’t until TIROS-9 in 1965 that the program achieved complete daily coverage of the entire sun-illuminated side of the planet.

April 1 has further import in the history of meteorology. It was this day in 1875 that Francis Galton (cousin of Charles Darwin) published the first newspaper weather map in The Times (London).

Galton’s chart of conditions in northwestern Europe on the previous day had virtually all the elements of a modern weather map: isobars (lines of equal atmospheric pressure), temperatures, wind speed and direction, and sky and sea conditions.

APRIL 04

AT THE 32ND ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONY, BEN-HUR WINS A RECORD NUMBER OF OSCARS, INCLUDING BEST PICTURE. Clocking in at three hours and 32 minutes, William Wyler’s Technicolor epic Ben-Hur is the behemoth entry at the 32nd annual Academy Awards ceremony, held on this day in 1960, at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Setting an Oscar record, the film swept 11 of the 12 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Charlton Heston).

Wyler’s 1959 film was the latest dramatic adaptation of the mega-bestselling novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 by Lew Wallace.

Wallace, a former general in the American Civil War, wrote his most successful novel after experiencing a new awakening of his Christian faith. The book told the story of a young Jewish aristocrat, Judah Ben Hur, who chafes against the repressive Roman rule in Judea, loses his fortune and his family, but eventually triumphs over obstacles (thanks partially to the intervention of Jesus Christ).

After Wallace’s novel was adopted into a long-running stage play in 1899 and a short film in 1907, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the film rights and produced a major motion-picture version, directed

APRIL 04

ELVIS PRESLEY’S SONG “ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT” IS RECORDED FOR THE FIRST TIME. Morgan’s version was followed by the best-known recording, by Elvis Presley, recorded on April 4, 1960 along with “I Gotta Know”, and engineered

by Nashville sound pioneer Bill Porter. For this recording, guitarist Scotty Moore played on Elvis` acoustic guitar; the Gibson J200 model. Reportedly, Colonel Parker (it was one of his wife’s favorite songs) persuaded Elvis to record his own rendition of this song. Elvis’ version was based on the Blue Barron Orchestra version from 1950 with spoken segment. It went on to be one of the biggest-selling singles of 1960, peaking at number one on the Billboard pop chart for six weeks and peaking at number three on the R&B charts.

Elvis, occasionally during live performances, would randomly change lyrics to give them humorous connotations. The first recorded example of this was during his famous benefit concert for the USS Arizona Memorial at Bloch Arena in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on March 25, 1961. During this frenzied concert, Presley in a clearly fun mood while performing the spoken word section over constant audience screams, delivers lines like “Then came Act Two. You seemed to change. You got fat!” and “Now the stage is bare, and you’ve lost your hair.” The most popular among these humorous versions however was recorded at the International Hotel in Vegas on August 26, 1969.

During the performance, instead of singing: “Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there”, he sings “Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair”. Moments later, he saw a bald man in the audience (as legend has it), and burst into laughter which continued into the next lines. The audience was treated to additional laughter during

The Chance Vought/LTV Scout rocket was selected as the dedicated launch vehicle for the program because it delivered a payload into orbit for the lowest cost per pound. However, the Scout decision imposed two design constraints. First, the weights of the earlier satellites were about 300 lb each, but the Scout launch capacity to the Transit orbit was about 120 lb (it was later increased significantly). A satellite mass reduction had to be achieved despite a demand for more power than APL had previously designed into a satellite. The second problem concerned the increased vibration that affected the payload during launching because the Scout used solid rocket motors. Thus, electronic equipment that was smaller than before and rugged enough to withstand the increased vibration of launch had to be produced. Meeting the new demands was more difficult than expected, but it was accomplished. The first prototype operational satellite (Transit 5A-1) was launched into a polar orbit by a Scout rocket on 18 December 1962. The satellite verified a new technique for deploying the solar panels and for separating from the rocket, but otherwise it was not successful because of trouble with the power system. Transit 5A-2, launched on 5 April 1963, failed to achieve orbit. Transit 5A-3, with a redesigned power supply, was launched on 15 June 1963. A malfunction of the memory occurred during powered flight that kept it from accepting and storing the navigation message, and the oscillator stability was degraded during launch. Thus, 5A-3 could not be used for navigation. However, this satellite was the first to achieve gravity-gradient stabilization, and its other subsystems performed well.

ad-libbing jokes throughout. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown; the 1981 documentary film This Is Elvis uses footage of this performance to illustrate Presley’s physical deterioration near the end of his life. Darrin Memmer’s book Elvis Presley - The 1977 CBS Television Special, published in 2001 by Morris Publishing, suggests it was intentional, as does the recorded evidence that Presley had been fooling with the song in live performance as far back as 1961. It is suggested that Elvis would purposely ruin the song because, as stated, it was one of Parker’s wife’s favorite songs, hence a dig at Parker, who Presley had begun to despise toward the end of his life. To this suggestion Elvis expert Jan-Erik Kjeseth has said that Elvis may very well have begun to despise his manager, but whether he did or not has no relevance to the way he treated the song on the TV show. That was just Elvis ad-libbing as the mood took him.

APRIL 04

ERIC PEUGEOT, THE YOUNGEST SON OF THE FOUNDER OF THE PEUGEOT CORPORATION, IS KIDNAPPED IN PARIS.

It is noteworthy that surveyors used Transit to locate remote benchmarks by averaging dozens of Transit fixes, producing sub-meter accuracy. In fact, the elevation of Mount Everest was corrected in the late 1980s by using a Transit receiver to re-survey a nearby benchmark.

Racing continued as well, with Boillot entering the 1919 Targa Florio in a 2.5-liter (150ci) car designed for an event pre-empted by World War One; the car had 200,000 km (120,000 mi) on it, yet Boillot won with an impressive drive (the best of his career)[21] Peugeots in his hands were third in the 1925 Targa, first in the 1922 and 1925 Coppa Florios, first in the 1923 and 1925 Touring Car Grands Prix, and first at the 1926 Spa 24 Hours.

[21] Peugeot introduced a five valve per cylinder, triple overhead cam engine for the Grand Prix, conceived by Marcel Gremillon (who had criticised the early DOHC); but the engine was a failure.

The TRANSIT system was made obsolete by the Global Positioning System (GPS), and ceased navigation service in 1996. Improvements in electronics allowed the GPS system to effectively take several fixes at once, greatly reducing the complexity of deducing a position. The GPS system uses many more satellites than were used with TRANSIT, allowing the system to be used continuously, while TRANSIT provided a fix only every hour or more.

Kentucky native nearly did not make the trip to Rome, however...

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The length of the recess was the point picked out

by Herter Saturday for attack. “I personally believe the recess is too long,” he said, “but In view of the agreement reached I shall not press for a re-opening of the matter.” “Misunderstanding” That was one of two sent ences in Herter’s statement. In the first sentence he virtually conceded he had been wrong in blaming th Russians for tak ing the lead in demanding long recess. In contrast to what he had told his news conference Friday he said the agreement actually was the result “of a general understanding among all 10 delegations rather than on the initiative of any one of them.” Eaton had made that same point at Geneva.

APRIL 17

RUSSWOOD PARK, A BASEBALL STADIUM IN MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, BURNS TO THE GROUND FROM A FIRE SHORTLY AFTER A CHICAGO WHITE SOX VERSUS CLEVELAND INDIANS MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAME. To mark the anniversary of the April 17, 1960, fire, we’ve talked to some old-timers -- sorry, guys -- about their memories of a park where Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Stan Musial (and let’s not forget Dixie Upright, Ox Eckhardt and Coaker Triplett) all played ball.

It smelled. The minute you walked into the guts of the entry plaza, you could smell the hot dogs and the popcorn. I have two strong memories, and that’s one of them.

APRIL 13

The other memory is the unbelievable noise ... because everything was wood and when people started clapping for a rally, they also stomped their feet on the wood and it was just unbelievably loud when they did that. They’d do this rhythmic clapping and stomp their feet and it would be just unbelievable.

This system allowed the missile to strike within 100 metres of its designated target. In addition, the pilots of the Avro Vulcan or Handley Page Victor bombers could tie their systems into those of the missile and make use of the guidance system to help plot their own flight plan, since the unit in the missile was more advanced than that in the aircraft.

THE PROPOSED MASS-PRODUCTION OF THE BLUE STREAK MISSILE IS CANCELED. Blue Steel was the result of a Ministry of Supply memorandum from 5 November 1954 that predicted that by 1960 Soviet air defences would make it prohibitively dangerous for V bombers to attack with nuclear gravity bombs. The answer was for a rocket-powered, supersonic missile capable of carrying a large nuclear (or projected thermonuclear) warhead with a range of at least 50 mi (80 km). This would keep the bombers out of range of Soviet ground-based defences installed around the target area, allowing the warhead to “dash” in at high speed.

Every time I went there, I felt like I was going to see something really special -- and I went there a lot. There were times we even walked home from Russwood, this was in the ‘50s, living in what even now is considered East Memphis. I’m talking probably eight or nine miles from a Sunday day game.

APRIL 16

THE GUNMAN DAVID PRATT SHOOTS SOUTH AFRICAN PRIME MINISTER HENRIK VERWOERD IN JOHANNESBURG, WOUNDING HIM SERIOUSLY.

There would have to be a balance between the size of the warhead (Orange Herald or Green Bamboo as developed by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) and the need for it to be carried by any of the three V-bomber types in use, and that it should be able to reach Mach 3. The Air Staff issued this requirement for a Stand-off bomb as OR.1132 in September 1954.

I remember that round ball sign that they had out in front of the ballpark. “Baseball today” -- and it would be what time and who they were playing.

They’d put it up by hand.

I Hurt In State Crash (By The Associated Press> Two persons were killed Saturday night and a third was injured when their car left Highway 41 and overturned in Washington County. The victims were William Miracle, 23, Herfer Assails Geneva Recess Made by Aide (Related Story Page 13) ^ural Wautoma, the driver; WASHINGTON ~m~ Sec- ‘^rs.

Arlene Boeteler, 35, retary of State Herter de-;of Milwaukee, his sister, nounced Saturday a rece. ss! Raymond Towey, 29, of Oshkosh, their brother in law, was injured seriously. agreement made by his own disarmament negotiator at Geneva. But he said that since the deed was done he would let it stand., Herter’s statement came close to being a rebuke for Ambassador Fredrick M. Eaton, New York lawyer and board member of many banking and industrial firms, who is a newcomer to big time diplomacy. Some State Department officials said privately that Herter did not intend the statement to be a rebuke or reprimand. Others equally familiar with the circumstances said there could be no doubt that a declaration by the Secretary of State deploring an agreement Eaton announced this morning was a slap for the man in Geneva.

The Ministry of Supply selected Avro out of the British manufacturers though it had no previous experience in working on guided weapons other than some private venture work; Handley Page had suggested a 500 nmi (930 km) missile but the Elliots gyro based guidance system was inaccurate beyond 100 nmi (190 km). Avro began work proper in 1955, with the assigned Rainbow Code name of “Blue Steel” which it would keep in service. With Elliots working on the guidance system Armstrong Siddeley would develop the liquid fuel engine.

Its design period was protracted, with various development problems exacerbated by the fact that designers lacked information on the actual size and weight of the proposed boosted-fission warhead Green Bamboo, or its likely thermonuclear successor derived from the Granite series. The large girth of Blue Steel was determined by the 45 inches (1.1 m) implosion sphere diameter of Green Bamboo.

lO ‘Nation Parley The agreement provides for about a five-week recess in the 10-nation Geneva disarmament conference until after the summit meeting at Paris in late May. Herter’s statement came as the climax of a series of comments which indicate at the least some kind of breakdown in communications between him and Eaton. Friday Herter told a news conference the Soviets were seeking a long recess in the Geneva disarmament talks, beginning well before and running until after the summit conference which opens May 16.

Herter also declared emphatically that he saw no reason for a long recess but would be willing to accept a short one. Already Committed Indications are that at the time Herter was speaking Eaton may already have committed himself to a long recess Herter aides who have followed the reports from Geneva in detail said that the deal on the suspension of negotiations was made in the last day or so.

Avro proposed that Blue Steel would evolve over time, subsequent versions increasing speed (to Mach 4.5) and range. The ultimate Blue Steel would be a 900 nmi (1,700 km) range weapon that could be launched by the supersonic Avro 730 under development. They were told to limit themselves to the specification of OR.1132.[3] The project was delayed by the need to develop the stainless steel fabrication techniques; this would have been gained in building the Avro 730 but that had been cancelled by then. Elliots guidance system was plagued by accuracy problems delaying test flights.

As it turned out, neither of the originally-proposed UK-designed warheads were actually fitted, being superseded by Red Snow, an Anglicised variant of the U.S. W-28 thermonuclear warhead of 1.1 Mt yield. Red Snow was smaller and lighter than the earlier warhead proposals. The missile was fitted with a state-of-the-art inertial navigation unit.

The fire -- I was off at college (Tennessee). My parents called me, and I cried. I literally cried because I knew it would never be rebuilt. Minor league baseball was already going through its dying period because of major league baseball on TV. By then, crowds were very small already at Russwood.

I was in mourning for probably a year. It was devastating to me. Up in smoke went the memories of Sammy Esposito and Luis Aparicio and Jim Landis and Bill Wilson and those home runs between the arrows for $200 a home run. I was there the day Jim Marshall hit the sign, and he realized he hit it when he was halfway between first and second and he cart-wheeled all the way around the basepaths, all the way home.

The most unique thing was it was a turtleback infield. You could be batting and you could see the upper torso of the outfielders if they were deep in the outfield because the field dipped down anywhere from 2, 2 1/2 feet on a slope for drainage.

When it burned, it seated 10,514. Three thousand seats were behind home plate. Seven thousand were down the leftfield line, and about 500 were on the rightfield line. It was kind of a funkyshaped park. I remember when it burned down. I was around 9 or 10 years old. My grandfather had season tickets. We were at the game. It was Easter Sunday. We were in Box T, which was right behind the Chicago White Sox dugout (for the exhibition game vs. the Cleveland Indians).

We came home and had an Easter egg hunt that night and had all types of people call us and say, ‘Are you OK? Are you all right?’ They thought the fire happened during the game, but the game had long been over with. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Where I lived out in Whitehaven, you could see like an orange glow. The closer you got, the flames were higher than Baptist Hospital. ... All the windows were popping out of Baptist Hospital and they had to evacuate people there.

The field was actually playable two days after the fire, because it was virtually untouched except for the light standards falling on the foul territory.

We moved around to a football stadium with a sorry rightfield of 190 feet or so. Then we played at Tobey Park. At the end of the season we gave up the franchise. Even had they rebuilt the park, the whole league disbanded the following year.

They had circuses there, Billy Graham was there, Elvis Presley had two concerts there. Ole Miss, Tennessee, Arkansas, LSU, they all played their big (football) games there.

APRIL 21

SOUTH KOREAN STUDENTS HOLD A NATIONWIDE PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTEST AGAINST PRESIDENT SYNGMAN RHEE. THUS EVENTUALLY LEADS HIM TO RESIGN FROM THAT OFFICE. South Korea experienced political turmoil under years of autocratic leadership of Syngman Rhee, which was ended by student revolt in 1960.

Throughout his rule, Rhee sought to take additional steps to cement his control of government.

These began in 1952, when the government was still based in Busan due to the ongoing war. In May of that year, Rhee pushed through constitutional amendments which made the presidency a directly-elected position. To do this, he declared martial law, arrested opposing members of parliament, demonstrators, and anti-government groups. Rhee was subsequently elected by a wide margin.

Rhee regained control of parliament in the 1954 elections, and thereupon fraudulently pushed through an amendment to exempt himself from the eight-year term limit, and was once again re-elected in 1956. Soon after, Rhee’s administration arrested members of the opposing party and executed the leader after accusing him of being a North Korean spy.

The administration became increasingly repressive while dominating the political arena and in 1958, sought to amend the National Security Law to tighten government control over all levels of administration, including the local units. These measures caused much outrage among the people, but despite the society’s resentment, Rhee’s administration rigged the March 15, 1960 presidential elections and won by a landslide. National Security Law to tighten government control over all levels

of administration, including the local units.

On that election day, protests by students and citizens against the irregularities of the election burst out in the city of Masan. Initially these protests were quelled with force by local police, but when the body of a student was found floating in the harbor of Masan, the whole nation was enraged and protests spread nationwide. On April 19, students from various universities and schools rallied and marched in protest in the Seoul streets, in what would be called the April Revolution. The government declared martial law, called in the army, and suppressed the crowds with open fire.

Afraid of airplane travel, he insisted on taking a parachute with him in the plane...

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THE UNITED STATES LAUNCHES THE FIRST WEATHER SATELLITE, TIROS-1.

Powers was discharged from the Air Force in 1956 with the rank of captain. He then joined the CIA’s U-2 program at the civilian grade of GS-12. U-2 pilots flew espionage missions using an aircraft that could reach altitudes above 70,000 feet (21,3km), making it invulnerable to Soviet anti-aircraft weapons of the time. The U-2 was equipped with a state-of-the-art camera designed to take high-resolution photos from the edge of the stratosphere over hostile countries, including the Soviet Union.

U-2 missions systematically photographed military installations and other important sites.

NSA report remains classified, possibly to spare the blushes of its authors. For it is now possible to piece together what really happened high over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960, and to understand why America’s most secretive intelligence agency got it so wrong”. According to the article cited, the still classified NSA report is incorrect based on the CIA documents that were declassified which show that Powers’ account of being shot down at altitude was accurate.

MAY 03

Powers’ U-2 plane was hit by the first S-75 missile fired. A total of eight were launched; one missile hit a MiG-19 jet fighter sent to intercept the U-2, but could not reach a high enough altitude. The Soviet pilot, Sergey Safronov, crashed his plane in an unpopulated forest area rather than bail out and risk his plane crashing into nearby Degtyarsk.

Another Soviet aircraft, a newly manufactured Su-9 in transit flight, also attempted to intercept Powers’ U-2. The unarmed Su-9 was directed to ram the U-2. The pilot attempted but missed because of the large differences in speed. Powers claimed, as recounted in “The Skunk Works”, that upon ejecting he saw the parachute of another pilot deploy behind him.

When the U.S. government learned of Powers’ disappearance over the Soviet Union, they issued a cover statement claiming a “weather plane” had strayed off course after its pilot had “difficulties with his oxygen equipment.” What CIA officials did not realize was that the plane crashed almost fully intact, and the Soviets recovered its equipment. Powers was interrogated extensively by the KGB for months before he made a confession and a public apology for his part in espionage. The incident set back talks between Khrushchev and Eisenhower. On August 17, 1960, Powers was convicted of espionage against the Soviet Union and was sentenced to a total of ten years, three years in imprisonment followed by seven years of hard labor. He was held in Vladimir Central Prison, 100 miles east of Moscow. The prison contains a small museum with an exhibit on Powers, who allegedly developed a good rapport with Russian prisoners there. Some pieces of the plane and Gary Powers’ uniform are on display at the Monino Airbase museum, close to Moscow.

On February 10, 1962, Powers was exchanged, along with American student Frederic Pryor, in a well-publicized spy swap at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, Germany. The exchange was for Soviet KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher (aka Rudolf Abel), who had been caught by the FBI and jailed for espionage.

In 2010, CIA documents were released indicating that “top US officials never believed Powers’ account of his fateful flight because it appeared to be directly contradicted by a report from the National Security Agency, the clandestine US network of codebreakers and listening posts. The

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER SIGNS THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1960 INTO LAW.

Kenya became independent on December 12, 1963, and the next year became a republic within the Commonwealth. Jomo Kenyatta, a member of the predominant Kĩkũyũ tribe and head of the Kenya African National Union, became Kenya’s first president. KADU dissolved itself voluntarily in 1964 and joined KANU. A small but significant leftist opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), was formed in 1966, led by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, a former vice president and Luo elder. The KPU was banned and its leader detained after political unrest related to Kenyatta’s visit to Nyanza Province. No new opposition parties were formed after 1969, and KANU became the sole political party. At Kenyatta’s death in August 1978, Vice President Daniel arap Moi, a former KADU member became interim President. On October 14, Moi became President formally after he was elected head of KANU and designated its sole nominee.

I have today signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1960. It is only the second civil rights measure to pass the Congress in 85 years. As was the case with the Act of 1957, recommendations of this Administration underlie the features of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

EUROPEAN FREE TRADE ASSOCIATION (EFTA) ESTABLISHED. EFTA was founded in 1960 on the premise of free trade as a means of achieving growth and prosperity amongst its Member States as well as promoting closer economic cooperation between the Western European countries. Furthermore, the EFTA countries wished to contribute to the expansion of trade globally.

Based on these overall goals, EFTA today maintains the management of the EFTA Convention (intra-EFTA trade), the EEA Agreement (EFTA-EU relations), and the EFTA Free Trade Agreements (third country relations). The EFTA Convention and EFTA free trade agreements are managed by the Geneva office, and the EEA Agreement by the Brussels office.

Soviet intelligence, especially the KGB, had been aware of U-2 missions since 1956, but they lacked effective counter-measures until 1960. Powers’ U-2, which departed from a military airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan and may have received support from the US Air Station at Badaber (Peshawar Air Station), was shot down by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Surface to Air) missile on May 1, 1960, over Sverdlovsk. Powers was unable to activate the plane’s self-destruct mechanism before he parachuted to the ground and was captured.

of KANU’s membership (Kenyatta himself being a Kĩkũyũ). KADU pressed for a federal constitution, while KANU was in favour of centralism. The advantage lay with the numerically stronger KANU. The British government finally brokered a compromise arrangement where under the short lived Majimbo system Kenya entered independence with a federal constitution.

MAY 06

EFTA was founded by the Stockholm Convention in 1960. The immediate aim of the Association was to provide a framework for the liberalisation of trade in goods amongst its Member States. At the same time, EFTA was established as an economic counterbalance to the more politically driven European Economic Community (EEC). Relations with the EEC, later the European Community (EC) and the European Union (EU), have been at the core of EFTA activities from the beginning. In the 1970s, the EFTA States concluded free trade agreements with the EC; in 1994 the EEA Agreement entered into force. Since the beginning of the 1990s, EFTA has actively pursued trade relations with third countries in and beyond Europe. The first partners were the Central and Eastern European countries, followed by the countries in the Mediterranean area. In recent years, EFTA’s network of free trade agreements has reached across the Atlantic as well as into Asia.

EFTA was founded by the following seven countries: Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Finland joined in 1961, Iceland in 1970 and Liechtenstein in 1991. In 1973, the United Kingdom and Denmark left EFTA to join the EC. They were followed

by Portugal in 1986 and by Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. Today the EFTA Member States are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

MAY 04

The new Act is concerned with a range of civil rights problems. One title makes it a crime to obstruct rights or duties under Federal court orders by force or threat of force. That provision will be an important deterrent to such obstruction which interferes with the execution of Federal court orders, including those involving school desegregation. Provision is also made to assure free public education to all children of Armed Forces personnel in the United States where local public school facilities are unavailable. By authorizing the FBI to investigate certain bombings or attempted bombings of schools, churches and other structures, the Act will deter such heinous acts of lawlessness.

In June 1982, the National Assembly amended the constitution, making Kenya officially a one-party state, and parliamentary elections were held in September 1983.

The new Act also deals significantly with that key constitutional right of every American, the right to vote without discrimination on account of race or color. One provision, which requires the retention of voting records, will be of invaluable aid in the successful enforcement of existing voting rights statutes. Another provision authorizes the use by federal courts of voting referees. It holds great promise of making the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution fully meaningful.

The 1988 elections reinforced the one-party system. However, in December 1991, parliament repealed the one-party section of the constitution.

By early 1992, several new parties had formed, and multiparty elections were held in December 1992. President Moi was reelected for another 5-year term. Opposition parties won about 45% of the parliamentary seats, but President Moi’s KANU Party obtained the majority of seats. Parliamentary reforms in November 1997 enlarged the democratic space in Kenya, including the expansion of political parties from 11 to 26. President Moi won re-election as President in the December 1997 elections, and his KANU Party narrowly retained its parliamentary majority, with 109 out of 212 seats.

While I regret that Congress saw fit to eliminate two of my recommendations, I believe the Act is an historic step forward in the field of civil rights.

With continuing help from all responsible persons, the new law will play an important role in the days ahead in attaining our goal of equality under law in all areas of our country for all Americans.

MAY 15

MAY 13

WEST GERMAN REFUGEE MINISTER THEODOR OBERLÄNDER IS FIRED BECAUSE OF HIS PAST WITH NAZI GERMANY. In the fall of 1959, the Eastern Bloc unleashed a coordinated campaign against the presence of Nazis in West German government, which included Oberländer. He was accused of participating in the Lviv Massacre. In 1960 Oberländer was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by an East German political court, for his alleged involvement in the Lviv massacre in 1941. In 1986, Oberländer received the Bavarian Order of Merit from the state of Bavaria, and at the end of his life, he became involved in anti-immigration politics.

Oberländer was the chief spokesman for these Vertriebene, the “expellees” or the “driven off.

In the 1950s…Oberländer headed a key political party that kept attitudes firmly fixed on loss and grievance. He had participated in pogroms against the Jews but opposed the Nazis’ policy toward the occupied territories - like von Mende, he thought Germany should be the non-Russians’ ally. For that he lost his position in the party and his military command. That setback became a blessing after the war, allowing him to position himself as a victim of the Nazis instead of a party insider… Oberländer was probably the farthest-right member of the West German government, and in later years he came to be considered the personification of the young democracy’s Nazi roots.

THE SATELLITE SPUTNIK 4 IS LAUNCHED INTO ORBIT BY THE SOVIET UNION.

THE KENYAN AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS PARTY IS FOUNDED IN KENYA, WHEN 3 POLITICAL PARTIES JOIN FORCES.

I remember quite well the Sunday morning when the news of the launch of Sputnik-4 was announced. It really made big headlines and was seen as a first step to manned spaceflight, despite the fact that TASS clearly stated that the spacecraft would not be returned to earth. Early press reports were quite detailed based on Soviet official announcements. The total mass of 4540 kg was astounding and the airtight cabin was said to weigh 2.5 tons and containing a “dummy” spaceman. It was also clearly stated that the “cabin” would be detached on command and burn up upon re-entry.

The orbit was given as having an inclination of 65 degrees and an altitude of 320 kilometres (actually the orbital altitude was 312-369 km).

The Kenya African Study Union was a political organization formed in 1944 to articulate Kenyan grievances against the British colonial administration of the time. KASU, later renamed the Kenya African Union, attempted to be more inclusive than its successor Kikuyu Central Association by avoiding tribal politics. Kenya African Union was led by Jomo Kenyatta from 1947. In 1960 KAU merged with Kenya Independent Movement and the People’s Congress Party to form Kenya African National Union (KANU). From October 1952 to December 1959, Kenya was under a state of emergency arising from the “Mau Mau” rebellion against British colonial rule. During this period, African participation in the political process increased rapidly.

The TASS communiqué also gave the radio frequency of 19.995 MHz for the radio beacon which also could be used for radiotelephone communications. The existence of solar panels on the spacecraft was also indicated in this first announcement (see figure above).

UPI’s monitoring station at Bickley in Kent picked up signals at 0600 UT on Sunday 15 May 1960 on 19.995 MHz. This was on the spacecraft’s forth revolution around the Earth. The signal was described as “plingeling” (in Swedish) or the Morse letter A with a purring sound at the end. The Swedish telecommunications Agency monitoring station at Enköping picked a strong CW signal on 19.995 MHz with doppler shift at 0738-0757 UT on 15 May 1960.

The first direct elections for Africans to the Legislative Council took place in 1957. The Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) was founded in 1960, to challenge KANU. KADU’s aim was to defend the interests of the tribes so-called KAMATUSA (an acronym for Kalenjin, Maasai, Turkana and Samburu), against the dominance of the larger Luo and Kĩkũyũ tribes that comprised the majority

On September 5, 1960, however, The Greatest finished his dominance in the Light...

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known as “Q switching” was introduced at the Hughes Laboratory, shortening the pulse of laser light still further and increasing the instantaneous power to millions of watts and beyond. Lasers now have powers as high as a million billion (1015) watts! The high intensity of pulsed laser light allowed a wide range of new types of experiment, and launched the now-burgeoning field of nonlinear optics. Nonlinear interactions between light and matter allow the frequency of light to be doubled or tripled, so for example an intense red laser can be used to produce green light.

MAY 16

THEODORE MAIMAN OPERATES THE FIRST LASER. When the first working laser was reported in 1960, it was described as “a solution looking for a problem.” But before long the laser’s distinctive qualities—its ability to generate an intense, very narrow beam of light of a single wavelength— were being harnessed for science, technology and medicine. Today, lasers are everywhere: from research laboratories at the cutting edge of quantum physics to medical clinics, supermarket checkouts and the telephone network.

I had a busy job in Washington at the time when various groups were trying to make the earliest lasers. But I was also supervising graduate students at Columbia University who were trying to make continuously pumped infrared lasers. Shortly after the ruby laser came out I advised them to stop this work and instead capitalize on the power of the new ruby laser to do an experiment on two-photon excitation of atoms. This was one of the early experiments in nonlinear optics, and two-photon excitation is now widely used to study atoms and molecules.

Lasers work by adding energy to atoms or molecules, so that there are more in a high-energy (“excited”) state than in some lower-energy state; this is known as a “population inversion.”

When this occurs, light waves passing through the material stimulate more radiation from the excited states than they lose by absorption due to atoms or molecules in the lower state. This “stimulated emission” is the basis of masers (whose name stands for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) and lasers (the same, but for light instead of microwaves).

MAY 20

IN JAPAN, POLICE CARRY AWAY SOCIALIST MEMBERS OF THE DIET OF JAPAN. THE DIET NEXT APPROVES A MUTUAL SECURITY TREATY WITH THE UNITED STATES.

Theodore Maiman made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces. He promptly submitted a short report of the work to the journal Physical Review Letters, but the editors turned it down. Some have thought this was because the Physical Review had announced that it was receiving too many papers on masers—the longer-wavelength predecessors of the laser—and had announced that any further papers would be turned down. But Simon Pasternack, who was an editor of Physical Review Letters at the time, has said that he turned down this historic paper because Maiman had just published, in June 1960, an article on the excitation of ruby with light, with an examination of the relaxation times between quantum states, and that the new work seemed to be simply more of the same. Pasternack’s reaction perhaps reflects the limited understanding at the time of the nature of lasers and their significance.

Eager to get his work quickly into publication, Maiman then turned to Nature, usually even more selective than Physical Review Letters, where the paper was better received and published on 6 August.

The Chinese Revolution was the second part of Chinese Civil War which ended in the establishmente of the People’s Republic of China. The term “Third World” was coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, on the model of the Third Estate, which, according to the Abbé Sieyès, represented everything, but was nothing: “...because at the end this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too” (Sauvy).

The emergence of this new political entity, in the frame of the Cold War, was complex and painful.

Several tentatives were made to organize newly independent states in order to oppose a common front towards both the US’s and the USSR’s influence on them, with the consequences of the Sino-Soviet split already at works. Thus, the Non-Aligned Movement constituted itself, around the main figures of Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of India, Sukarno, the Indonesian president, Josip Broz Tito the Communist leader of Yugoslavia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, head of Egypt who successfully opposed the French and British imperial powers during the 1956 Suez crisis. After the 1954 Geneva Conference which put an end to the French war against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, the 1955 Bandung Conference gathered Nasser, Nehru, Tito, Sukarno, the leader of Indonesia, and Zhou Enlai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China. As many African countries gained independence during the 1960s, some of these newly formed governments rejected the ideas of capitalism in favour of a more afrocentric economic model. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Léopold Senghor of Senegal, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sékou Touré of Guinea, were the main architects of African Socialism.

With official publication of Maiman’s first laser under way, the Hughes Research Laboratory made the first public announcement to the news media on 7 July 1960. This created quite a stir, with frontpage newspaper discussions of possible death rays, but also some skepticism among scientists, who were not yet able to see the careful and logically complete Nature paper. Another source of doubt came from the fact that Maiman did not report having seen a bright beam of light, which was the expected characteristic of a laser. I myself asked several of the Hughes group whether they had seen a bright beam, which surprisingly they had not. Maiman’s experiment was not set up to allow a simple beam to come out of it, but he analyzed the spectrum of light emitted and found a marked narrowing of the range of frequencies that it contained. This was just what had been predicted by the theoretical paper on optical masers (or lasers) by Art Schawlow and myself, and had been seen in the masers that produced the longer-wavelength microwave radiation. This evidence, presented in figure 2 of Maiman’s Nature paper, was definite proof of laser action. Shortly afterward, both in Maiman’s laboratory at Hughes and in Schawlow’s at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, bright red spots from ruby laser beams hitting the laboratory wall were seen and admired.

The Cuban Revolution (1953-1959) was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement and its allies against the government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953, and finally ousted Batista on 1 January 1959, replacing his government with Castro’s revolutionary state. Castro’s government later reformed along communist lines, becoming the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965.

In Hungary the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the People’s Republic of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956.

Maiman’s laser had several aspects not considered in our theoretical paper, nor discussed by others before the ruby demonstration. First, Maiman used a pulsed light source, lasting only a few milliseconds, to excite (or “pump”) the ruby. The laser thus produced only a short flash of light rather than a continuous wave, but because substantial energy was released during a short time, it provided much more power than had been envisaged in most of the earlier discussions. Before long, a technique

The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms on issues such as gay rights, abortion, gender roles and drugs in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist approach to social justice and focused mostly on labor unionization and questions of

social class. They rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism’s historical theory of class struggle. In the U.S., the “New Left” was associated with the Hippie movement and anti-war college campus protest movements. While initially formed in opposition to the “Old Left” Democratic party, groups composing the New Left gradually became central players in the Democratic coalition. In 1968 in Carrara, Italy the International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international anarchist conference held there in 1968 by the three existing European federations of France, the Italian and the Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the Bulgarian federation in French exile.

MAY 22

CHILE’S SUBDUCTION FAULT RUPTURES FROM TALCAHUANO TO TAITAO PENINSULA, CAUSING THE MOST POWERFUL EARTHQUAKE ON RECORD AND A TSUNAMI. The 1960 Valdivia earthquake or Great Chilean Earthquake of Sunday, 22 May 1960 was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, rating 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale. It occurred in the afternoon (19:11 GMT, 15:11 local time), and the resulting tsunami affected southern Chile, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, eastern New Zealand, southeast Australia, and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

The epicenter was near Lumaco (see map), approximately 570 kilometres (350 mi) south of Santiago, with Temuco being the closest large city. Valdivia was the most affected city. The tremor caused localised tsunamis that severely battered the Chilean coast, with waves up to 25 metres (82 ft).

The main tsunami raced across the Pacific Ocean and devastated Hilo, Hawaii. Waves as high as 10.7 metres (35 ft) were recorded 10,000 kilometres (6,200 mi) from the epicenter, and as far away as Japan and the Philippines.

The death toll and monetary losses arising from such a widespread disaster are not certain. Various estimates of the total number of fatalities from the earthquake and tsunamis have been published, with the USGS citing studies with figures of 2,231, 3,000, or 5,700 killed and another source uses an estimate of 6,000 dead. Different sources have estimated the monetary cost ranged from US$400 million to 800 million (or 2.9 to 5.8 billion in 2011 dollars, adjusted for inflation).

Extensive areas of the city were flooded. The electricity and water systems of Valdivia were totally destroyed. Witnesses reported underground water flowing up through the soil. Despite the heavy rains of 21 May, the city was without a water supply. The river turned brown with sediment from landslides and was full of floating debris, including entire houses. The lack of potable water became a serious problem in one of Chile’s rainiest regions.

MAY 23

PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL DAVID BEN-GURION ANNOUNCES THAT NAZI WAR CRIMINAL ADOLF EICHMANN HAS BEEN CAPTURED. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announces to the world that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann has been captured and will stand trial in Israel.

Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question,” was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina on May 11 and smuggled to Israel nine days later.

Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1906.

In November 1932, he joined the Nazi’s elite SS (Schutzstaffel) organization, whose members came to have broad responsibilities in Nazi Germany, including policing, intelligence, and the enforcement of Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. Eichmann steadily rose in the SS hierarchy, and with the German annexation of Austria in 1938, he was sent to Vienna with the mission of ridding the city of Jews. He set up an efficient Jewish deportment center and in 1939 was sent to Prague on a similar mission. That year, Eichmann was appointed to the Jewish section of the SS central security office in Berlin.

In January 1942, Eichmann met with top Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin for the purpose of planning a “final solution of the Jewish question,” as Nazi leader Hermann Goring put it. The Nazis decided to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population.

Eichmann was appointed to coordinate the identification, assembly, and transportation of millions of Jews from occupied Europe to the Nazi death camps, where Jews were gassed or worked to death. He carried this duty out with horrifying efficiency, and between three to four million Jews perished in the extermination camps before the end of World War II. Close to 2 million were executed elsewhere.

The Valdivia earthquake occurred at 15:11 UTC-4 on 22 May, and affected all of Chile between Talca and Chiloé Island, more than 400,000 square kilometres (150,000 sq mi). Coastal villages, such as Toltén, disappeared. At Corral, the main port of Valdivia, the water level rose 4 m (13 ft) before it began to recede. At 16:20 UTC-4, a wave of 8 m (26 ft) struck the Chilean coast, mainly between Concepción and Chiloé. Another wave measuring 10 m (33 ft) was reported ten minutes later.

Hundreds of people were already reported dead by the time the tsunami struck. One ship, Canelos, starting at the mouth of Valdivia River, sank after being moved 1.5 km (0.93 mi) backward and forward in the river; its mast is still visible from the road to Niebla.

A number of Spanish-colonial fortifications were completely destroyed. Soil subsidence also destroyed buildings, deepened local rivers, and created wetlands in places like the Río Cruces and Chorocomayo, a new aquatic park north of the city.

Following the war, Eichmann was captured by U.S. troops, but he escaped the prison camp in 1946 before having to face the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal.

Heavyweight Boxing Division, beating Zigzy Pietrzykowski of Poland to capture...

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NEW ZEALAND’S FIRST TELEVISION STATION BEGINS BROADCASTING IN THE CITY OF AUCKLAND. Full-time television broadcasting was first introduced in New Zealand in 1960 and transmitted from the NZBC’s existing 1YA radio broadcasting facility at 74 Shortland Street in Auckland, now home to the University of Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery. The annual television licence fee was NZ£4.

Initially, programming was done on a regional basis, with different services broadcasting from the main cities, AKTV2 in Auckland, being the first, followed by CHTV3 in Christchurch and WNTV1 in Wellington in 1961, and finally DNTV2 in Dunedin in 1962. Today, however, programming and scheduling is done in Auckland where all the major networks are now headquartered. It was not until 1969 that the four stations were networked, and the NZBC’s first live network news bulletin was broadcast.

The NZBC had asked the government for the approval of a second TV channel as early as 1964, but this was rejected as the government considered increasing coverage of the existing TV service to be of greater priority. By 1971, however, two proposals for a second channel were under consideration: that of the NZBC for a non-commercial service; and a separate commercial channel to be operated by an Independent Television Corporation. Although the Broadcasting Authority had favoured the Independent Television bid, the incoming Labour government favoured the NZBC’s application and awarded it the licence without any formal hearings beforehand. (Eventually, Independent Television was awarded NZ$50,000 in compensation.)

In November 1973, colour television using the Phase Alternating Line (PAL) system was introduced in readiness for the 1974 British Commonwealth Games, held in Christchurch in January and February 1974.

Gyllström’s relatives have said that the murder weapon is in the filled-in well. According to the police, Gyllström had an alibi for the night of the murders, which was given by his wife. Gyllström’s wife said that she was awake the whole night and that her husband had not been away from home.

However, the wife had said before her death that her husband had threatened to kill her, if she told the truth.

In California, McCarthy was well funded and organized. For Kennedy, a defeat could have ended his hopes of securing the nomination. On June 1, in the final days of the California campaign, Kennedy and McCarthy met in a televised debate. Kennedy had hopes of denting McCarthy’s strength in California pulling an upset victory in the state, but the debate proved to be “indecisive and disappointing.”

Most suspicion has focused on the alleged KGB spy, Hans Assmann. On 6 June 1960 he came to the Helsinki Surgical Hospital. Assmann`s behaviour in the hospital was particularly odd.

The patient appeared dishevelled, with black fingernails and his clothes covered in red stains.

Assmann may have lied to hospital staff about the cause of his appearance. He also pretended to be unconscious and was aggressive and nervous.

Assmann’s clothing matched the description of the Lake Bodom murderer. Assmann cut off his longish blond hair after details regarding the appearance of the murderer were revealed on the news. Assmann lived within five kilometres of Bodom, which was only a short distance from the shore of Lake Bodom. His behaviour could have suggested guilt at the time, especially as was noted by Surgical Hospital Curator Jorma Palo, as well as other hospital staff. The police had only a brief meeting with Turkham, but found little since they did not want to cross-examine doctors and did not take Assmann`s stained clothing for examination; in spite of the fact that the doctors in attendance were certain that the stains were composed of blood.

Later Palo wrote three books about Assmann and the murders. Former Detective Chief Inspector Matti Paloaro also suspected that Assmann was responsible for five other murders. Assmann has been linked to unsolved Finnish homicides such as Kyllikki Saari’s murder in Isojoki and the Tulilahti double murder in Heinävesi.

Kennedy won the South Dakota primary with relative ease, beating McCarthy, 50 percent to 20 percent of the vote. Kennedy managed to win California with 46 percent of the vote to McCarthy’s 42 percent, claiming the biggest prize in the nominating process as well as a crucial defeat to McCarthy’s campaign. Around midnight on June 4, Kennedy addressed supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, confidently promising to heal the many divisions within the country.

JUNE 07

U.S. SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY WINS THE CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY.

rain, mudslides and strong winds caused extreme damage across Hong Kong and southern China, leaving over 100 dead and over 18,000 homeless. The only positive aspect of the storm was its rainfall, which helped end a severe drought to the colony. An additional 1,600 people were killed following more landslides triggered by the remnants of the storm.

After addressing his supporters during the early morning hours of June 5, in a ballroom at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, Kennedy left through a service area to greet kitchen workers. In a crowded kitchen passageway, Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian-born Jordanian, opened fire with a .22 caliber revolver and shot Kennedy in the head at close range. Following the shooting, Kennedy was rushed to Central Receiving Hospital and then transferred to The Good Samaritan Hospital, where he died early in the morning on June 6. Kennedy’s body was returned to New York City, where he lay in repose at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for several days before the Requiem Mass was held there on June 8. His younger brother, U.S. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, eulogized him with the words: “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” Kennedy concluded the eulogy by paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw as he referred to his brother: “As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say Why not?’” Later that day, a funeral train carried Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington, D. C., where he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

In addition to its impact in Hong Kong, Mary brought heavy rains and flooding in Taiwan, especially in the capital city of Taipei. Moderate crop damage was seen to the rice crop. Four fishermen drowned off the southern coast of the island, but there were no fatalities on the island. Despite its effects, the name Mary was not retired.

JUNE 15

VIOLENT DEMONSTRATIONS AT TOKYO UNIVERSITY RESULT IN 182 ARRESTS, 589 INJURIES. Yuichi Yoshikawa visits the south entrance of the Diet building every June 15 to offer flowers in memory of a female college student who died there in a clash between police forces and anti-Japan-U.S. security treaty demonstrators on the day 50 years ago.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters surrounded the building every day to express their opposition to the bilateral treaty “as we still had vivid memories of World War II, which had ended only 15 years (earlier), and believed the treaty would lead to another war,” said Yoshikawa, 79, a veteran peace campaigner.

JUNE 05

LAKE BODOM MURDERS OCCUR IN FINLAND.

The Lake Bodom murders were a multiple homicide that took place in Finland in 1960. Lake Bodom is a lake by the city of Espoo, about 22 kilometres west of the country’s capital, Helsinki.

In the early hours of June 5, 1960, four teenagers were camping on the shores of Lake Bodom.

Between 4AM and 6AM, an unknown person or people murdered three of them with a knife and blunt instrument wounding the fourth. The sole survivor, Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson, led a normal life until 2004, when he became a suspect and was subsequently charged. In October 2005, a district court found Gustafsson not guilty of all charges against him.

The murders have proven to be a popular subject in the Finnish media and commonly return to the headlines whenever new information or theories surface, but the case is still unsolved.

One of the prime suspects of the murders was Karl Valdemar Gyllström, a kiosk keeper from Oittaa.

He was known to have hated campers and behaved aggressively. In Oittaa Gyllström was known as “Kiosk Man”. He drowned in Lake Bodom in 1969, and while drunk he confessed the murders to his neighbor before his death, saying: “I killed them.”

Gyllström filled the well in his courtyard a few days after the murders and therefore Gyllström’s house and the courtyard were studied in depth.

Nothing incriminating, however, was found.

On the other hand, it is possible that all of the articles were hidden or destroyed. For example,

Campaigning vigorously in Nebraska, Kennedy hoped for a big win to give him momentum going into the California primary, in which McCarthy held a strong presence. While McCarthy made only one visit to Nebraska, Kennedy made numerous appearances and won the Nebraska primary on May 14, with 51.4 percent of the vote to McCarthy’s 31 percent, a distant second- place finish. After the results Kennedy declared that McCarthy and Kennedy, both anti-war, had managed to earn over 80 percent of the vote, “a smashing repudiation” of the Johnson-Humphrey administration.

In contrast to Nebraska, the Oregon primary posed several challenges to Kennedy’s campaign. His campaign organization, run by Congresswoman Edith Green, was not strong and Kennedy’s campaign themes of poverty, hunger, and minority issues didn’t resonate with Oregon voters. On May 28, Kennedy lost to McCarthy, “44.7 percent to 38.8 percent.” From Oregon, the campaign moved on to California.

Coming off victories in Indiana and Nebraska with new-found momentum, Kennedy hoped to take the California and South Dakota primaries on June 4.

California would be “the perfect place for Kennedy to demonstrate his voter-appeal.”

“When only a few people started a march with a flag, other people joined at their own initiative to make it hundreds of demonstrators at last, with antiwar sentiment stirred also by the outbreak of the Korean War and the launch of the Self-Defense Forces in the 1950s,” he said.

JUNE 09

TYPHOON MARY KILLS 1,600 PEOPLE IN CHINA.

The death of student Michiko Kanba, a 22-yearold senior at the University of Tokyo, happened in the uproar, and those who went through it have wondered about the meaning of the largest mass movement in postwar Japan and how it has affected their subsequent lives and careers over the past half-century.

Atrough of low pressure spawned a tropical depression in the South China Sea on June 3 and moved slowly westward. Favorable conditions allowed it to quickly strengthen into Tropical Storm Mary, and after turning northward it attained typhoon status on the 7th. Mary continued to intensify to a 90 mph (140 km/h) typhoon just before making landfall 20 miles (32 km) west of Hong Kong on the 8th. After weakening while moving northeastward over China, the storm restrengthened over the Western Pacific to a typhoon on the 10th. It passed near Okinawa, weakened, and accelerated to the east until it became extratropical on the 13th.

Among them is Akiko Esashi, who was a freshman at Waseda University and joined the demonstration for the first time in May 1960.

“I was just an ordinary student who cheered at baseball games between Waseda and its rival, Keio University, and I was told by my father when I left home in Hiroshima not to join the student movement,” she said. “But I started taking part in the marches frequently after Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi railroaded the revision of the bilateral treaty.”

Also known as Bloody Mary, the typhoon was the worst to hit Hong Kong in 23 years (since the worst typhoon on the record of Hong Kong hit on 2 September 1937). Its 14.12 inches (359 mm) of

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JUNE 26

THE MALAGASY REPUBLIC, NOW MADAGASCAR, BECOMES INDEPENDENT FROM FRANCE. After France adopted the Constitution of the Fifth Republic under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle, on September 28, 1958, Madagascar held a referendum to determine whether the country should become a self-governing republic within the French community. The AKFM and other nationalists opposed to the concept of limited self-rule mustered about 25 percent of votes cast.

The vast majority of the population at the urging of the PSD leadership voted in favor of the referendum. The vote led to the election of Tsiranana as the country’s first president on April 27, 1959.

After a year of negotiations between Tsiranana and his French counterparts, Madagascar’s status as a self-governing republic officially was altered on June 26, 1960, to that of a fully independent and sovereign state. The cornerstone of Tsiranana’s government was the signing with France of fourteen agreements and conventions designed to maintain and strengthen Franco-Malagasy ties.

These agreements were to provide the basis for increasing opposition from Tsiranana’s critics.

For some years after his resignation, Kishi remained an active member of the Liberal-Democratic party in Japan. He lived in Tokyo with his family. When a young man, he had married his cousin, Yoshiko Kishi, daughter of his adopted parents. They had two children, a son, Nobukazu, and a daughter, Yoko. After a lifetime of service to his country, Nobusuke Kishi died in Tokyo on August 7, 1987.

JUNE 23

THE JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER, NOBUSUKE KISHI, ANNOUNCES HIS RESIGNATION. Japan’s relations with the United States overshadowed all other issues in Kishi’s three-year term, from 1957 to the summer of 1960. The key was the security treaty, signed by the two countries in September 1951, during the last months of the Allied occupation. The treaty embodied Japan’s reliance on American armed forces to preserve its security, providing the right to station troops in Japan to be used not only “to deter armed attack upon Japan” but also, if necessary, “to put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances.” By the time Kishi took office, Japanese opposition to the treaty, growing out of a newly found self-confidence, was widespread. The treaty was criticized as an infringement on national sovereignty that involved Japan, without regard to its own will, in the Cold War politics of eastern Asia. Dissatisfaction was general, but proposed remedies ran the political gamut. Among the Socialists, neutralist sentiment, favoring abrogation of the treaty, was strong. Among the conservatives, there was support for a continuation of the relationship but on a more restricted basis that would enhance Japan’s political standing in the world.

A spirit of political reconciliation prevailed in the early 1960s. By achieving independence and obtaining the release of the MDRM leaders detained since the Revolt of 1947, Tsiranana had coopted the chief issues on which the more aggressively nationalist elements had built much of their support. Consistent with Tsiranana’s firm commitment to remain attached to Western civilization, the new regime made plain its intent to maintain strong ties to France and the West in the economic, defense, and cultural spheres. Not entirely sanguine about this prospect, the opposition initially concurred in the interest of consolidating the gains of the previous decade, and most ethnic and regional interests supported Tsiranana.

JUNE 24

JOSEPH KASAVUBU IS ELECTED AS THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE INDEPENDENT CONGO.

Seeking to profit from this national mood, Kishi made a much-heralded trip to Washington, DC, in June 1957. He won an American promise to withdraw all ground combat forces within a year.

Thereafter, he also gained American assent to negotiate a new treaty of mutual defense. Meetings between diplomats of the two countries began in the fall of 1958 and proceeded through the following year. In January 1960, Kishi once again flew to Washington for the treaty signing ceremony. By eliminating some of the offensive parts of the old treaty (including the clause permitting intervention of American forces in Japanese internal disturbances) and stressing mutual consultation and obligation, the new treaty gave the appearance of placing relations on an equilateral basis.

A day before the celebrations, workers were still frantically repainting facades on the main boulevard of the capital, Kinshasa, despite starting the job 18 months ago. And when one young man, covered in white paint, knocked on my door requesting access to the balcony, he begged for food as he had not eaten all day.

The Belgian King Albert II, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and other African heads of state in town for the anniversary will probably only see these revamped thoroughfares.

Kishi clearly saw the treaty as a major diplomatic triumph that might consolidate his power in the Liberal-Democratic party. The result, however, was quite the opposite. When the debate over ratification began in the National Diet, conflict intensified and gradually eroded his strength. Outside of the Diet, student groups, Socialists, Communists, labor leaders, and intellectuals, always distrustful of Kishi, joined in opposition and created the greatest political disturbances the nation had experienced since prewar days.

But for most residents of Kinshasa, Africa’s third largest city, getting electricity and running water would have been a preferable gesture. “A layer of paint will not give us food and salaries,” one Congolese man said about the preparations.

Once the personal property of the Belgian king, DR Congo - a vast country two-thirds the size of Western Europe with huge mineral wealth - gained independence from Belgium on the 30 June 1960. At a ceremony in the Congolese capital, then called Leopoldville, then-King Baudoin said, without a hint of irony: “Congo’s independence constitutes the outcome of the work initiated by the genius of Leopold II, undertaken by him with a tenacious courage and continued with perseverance by Belgium.”

In a tumultuous late-night session in mid-May 1960 after police had entered the Diet to remove Socialist party members who had staged a sitdown protest, Kishi forced a vote of approval through the lower house. His high-handed maneuver further inflamed public antipathy toward him and the treaty. The Diet and the prime minister’s official residence became scenes of swelling popular demonstrations. A planned visit of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had to be canceled. With no other choice, on June 23, 1960, Kishi announced his resignation. Shortly after, while attending a party for his successor, Ikeda Hayato, Kishi was stabbed by a rightist fanatic. The wound was not serious, however, and Kishi in the aftermath continued to exercise power from behind the scenes.

Similar to other African leaders during the immediate independence era, Tsiranana oversaw the consolidation of his own party’s power at the expense of other parties. A political system that strongly favored the incumbent complemented these actions. For example, although the political process allowed minority parties to participate, the constitution mandated a winner-take- all system that effectively denied the opposition a voice in governance. Tsiranana’s position was further strengthened by the broad, multiethnic popular base of the PSD among the côtiers, whereas the opposition was severely disorganized. The AKFM continued to experience intraparty rifts between leftist and ultranationalist, more orthodox Marxist factions; it was unable to capitalize on increasingly active but relatively less privileged Malagasy youth because the party’s base was the Merina middle class.

A new force on the political scene provided the first serious challenge to the Tsiranana government in April 1971. The National Movement for the Independence of Madagascar (Mouvement National pour l’Indépendance de Madagascar--Monima) led a peasant uprising in Toliara Province. The creator and leader of Monima was Monja Jaona, a côtier from the south who also participated in the Revolt of 1947. The main issue was government pressure for tax collection at a time when local cattle herds were being ravaged by disease. The protesters attacked military and administrative centers in the area, apparently hoping for support in the form of weapons and reinforcements from China. Such help never arrived, and the revolt was harshly and quickly suppressed. An estimated fifty to 1,000 persons died, Monima was dissolved, and Monima leaders, including Jaona and several hundred protesters, were arrested and deported to the island of Nosy Lava.

The Belgian monarch did not expect the new charismatic Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, to offer a different view of colonial rule in a speech made on the same day.

“Who will ever forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished; the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation were thrown?” said Mr Lumumba, who was murdered the next year, reportedly with US and Belgian complicity.

Replacing educational programs designed for schools in France and taught by French teachers with programs emphasizing Malagasy life and culture and taught by Malagasy instructors; and increasing access for economically underprivileged youth to secondary-level institutions. By early May, the PSD sought to end the student strike at any cost; on May 12 and 13, the government arrested several hundred student leaders and sent them to Nosy-Lava. Authorities also closed the schools and banned demonstrations.

Mounting economic stagnation--as revealed in scarcities of investment capital, a general decline in living standards, and the failure to meet even modest development goals--further undermined the government’s position. Forces unleashed by the growing economic crisis combined with student unrest to create an opposition alliance.

Workers, public servants, peasants, and many unemployed urban youth of Antananarivo joined the student strike, which spread to the provinces.

Protesters set fire to the town hall and to the offices of a French-language newspaper in the capital.

JUNE 30

THE BELGIAN CONGO RECEIVES ITS INDEPENDENCE FROM BELGIUM AS THE REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO (LÉOPOLDVILLE).

In May 1960, a growing nationalist movement, the Mouvement National Congolais or MNC Party, led by Patrice Lumumba, won the parliamentary elections. The party appointed Lumumba as Prime Minister. The parliament elected as President Joseph Kasavubu, of the Alliance des Bakongo (ABAKO) party. Other parties that emerged included the Parti Solidaire Africain (or PSA) led by Antoine Gizenga, and the Parti National du Peuple (or PNP) led by Albert Delvaux and Laurent Mbariko. (Congo 1960, dossiers du CRISP, Belgium) The Belgian Congo achieved independence on 30 June 1960 under the name “République du Congo” (“Republic of Congo” or “Republic of the Congo” in English).

Shortly after independence, the provinces of Katanga (led by Moise Tshombe) and South Kasai engaged in secessionist struggles against the new leadership. Most of the 100,000 Europeans who had remained behind after independence fled the country, opening the way for Congolese to replace the European military and administrative elite.

As the neighboring French colony of Middle Congo (Moyen Congo) also chose the name “Republic of Congo” upon achieving its independence, the two countries were more commonly known as “Congo-Léopoldville” and “Congo-Brazzaville”, after their capital cities. Another way they were often distinguished during the 1960s, such as in newspaper articles, was that “Congo-Léopoldville” was called “The Congo” and “Congo-Brazzaville” was called simply “Congo”. Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba from office. Lumumba declared Kasavubu’s action unconstitutional and a crisis between the two leaders developed. (cf. Sécession au Katanga – J.Gerald-Libois -Brussels- CRISP).

Lumumba had previously appointed Joseph Mobutu chief of staff of the new Congo army, Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC). Taking advantage of the leadership crisis between Kasavubu and Lumumba, Mobutu garnered enough support within the army to create mutiny. With financial support from the United States and Belgium, Mobutu paid his soldiers privately. The aversion of Western powers to communism and leftist ideology influenced their decision to finance Mobutu’s quest to maintain “order” in the new state by neutralizing Kasavubu and Lumumba in a coup by proxy. A constitutional referendum after Mobutu’s coup of 1965 resulted in the country’s official name being changed to the “Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

At the time of its independence in 1960, DRC was the second most industrialized country in Africa after South Africa, it boasted a thriving mining sector and its agriculture sector was relatively productive. The two recent conflicts (the First and Second Congo Wars), which began in 1996, have dramatically reduced national output and government revenue, have increased external debt, and have resulted in deaths of more than five million people from war, and associated famine and disease. Malnutrition affects approximately two thirds of the country’s population.

Olympic Gold. Sports Illustrated praised Clay’s “supreme confidence” and “intricate dance steps.”...

Another movement came on the scene in early 1972, in the form of student protests in Antananarivo. A general strike involving the nation’s roughly 100,000 secondary-level students focused on three principal issues: ending the cultural cooperation agreements with France.

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12 June

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JULY 01

GHANA BECOMES A REPUBLIC AND KWAME NKRUMAH BECOMES ITS FIRST PRESIDENT. On 6 March 1957 at 12 a.m Kwame Nkrumah declared Ghana’s establishment and autonomy as the first Prime Minister of Ghana and on 1 July 1960, Nkrumah declared Ghana as a republic as the first President of Ghana. The flag of Ghana, consisting of the colours red, gold, green, and the black star, became the new flag in 1957. Designed

by Theodosia Salome Okoh, the red represents the blood that was shed towards independence, the gold represents the industrial minerals wealth of Ghana, the green symbolises the rich grasslands of Ghana, and the black star is the symbol of the Ghanaian people and African emancipation.

The first Prime Minister of Ghana and President of Ghana Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah won a majority in the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly in 1952, Nkrumah was appointed leader of the Gold Coast’s government business.[20] Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana, and then President of Ghana, was the first African head of state to promote Pan-Africanism, an idea he came into contact with during his studies at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in the United States, at the time when Marcus Garvey was becoming famous for his “Back to Africa Movement”. Nkrumah merged the teachings of Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the naturalized Ghanaian scholar W. E. B. Du Bois into the formation of 1960s Ghana.

Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, as he became known, played an instrumental part in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement and his life achievements were recognised by Ghanaians during his centenary birthday celebration, and the day was instituted as a public holiday. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s government was subsequently overthrown by a military coup while he was abroad with Zhou Enlai in the People’s Republic of China in February 1966. Former Central Intelligence Agency employee John Stockwell stated to the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) that the CIA had an effective hand in forcing the coup.

A series of alternating military and civilian governments from 1966 to 1981 ended with the ascension to power of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings of the Provisional National Defense Council (NDC) in 1981. These changes resulted in the suspension of the constitution in 1981, and the banning of political parties. The economy suffered a severe decline soon after, Kwame Darko negotiated a structural adjustment plan changing many old economic policies, and economic growth soon recovered from the mid-2000s. A new constitution restoring multi-party politics was promulgated in 1992; Rawlings was elected as president then, and again in 1996. Winning the 2000 elections, John Agyekum Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was sworn into office as president in January 2001, and attained the presidency again in 2004, thus also serving two terms as president and thus marking the first time that power had been transferred to one legitimately elected head of state and head of government to another, and securing Ghana’s status as a stable democracy.

JULY 02

A SOVIET AIR FORCE MIG-19 FIGHTER PLANE FLYING NORTH OF MURMANSK, RUSSIA, OVER THE BARENTS SEA SHOOTS DOWN A SIX-MAN RB-47 STRATOJET RECONNAISSANCE PLANE OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE. On July 1st, 1960, two months to the day that a CIA U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, a United States Air Force RB-47H reconnaissance plane, tail number 53-4281, and assigned to the 38th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron of the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing based at Forbes Air Force Base, Kansas, departed from Brize-Norton Royal Air Force Base in England.

The plane was crewed by Major Willard Palm as Aircraft Commander; Captain Freeman B. Olmstead as pilot; Captain John McKone as navigator. Lodged in the converted bomber’s bomb bay were tons of electronic gear designed to measure the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet radar defenses, and three “Raven” reconnaissance officers: Major Eugene Posa, Captain Dean Phillips & Captain Oscar Goforth (on his first operational mission).

Olmstead was born in Elmira, New York, and brought up in a devout Episcopal family. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. He entered active duty with the Air Force in 1957 and attended the service’s Squadron Officer School.

McKone was a native of Tonganoxie, Kansas, and he graduated from Kansas State University with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1954. He was the Cadet Wing Commander for the Air Force ROTC wing during his senior year, and he entered active duty on March 15, 1955, as a Second lieutenant – beginning his career as a Strategic Air Command navigator in April 1956.

Spain, still under Francisco Franco’s far-right dictatorship, refused to travel to the Soviet Union, the main supporter of the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and withdrew from the tournament, so the final four had three communist countries: USSR, Czechoslovakia, and SFR Yugoslavia, to go with hosts France. In the semi-finals, the Soviets made easy work of the Czechoslovaks in Marseille, beating them 3–0. The other match saw a nine-goal thriller as Yugoslavia came on top 5–4, coming back from a two-goal deficit twice.

Czechoslovakia beat the demoralized French 2–0 for third place.

zUnder UN pressure, Tshombe later agreed to a three-stage plan from the acting Secretary General, U Thant, that would have reunited Katanga with Congo. However, this remained an agreement on paper only.

Urged on by Congo’s leader Cyrille Adola, UN forces launched a decisive attack on Katanga in December 1962. The capital, Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), fell in January 1963, and Tshombe fled to Kolwezi, where he surrendered on January 15, 1963. The Katangese secession was formally ended by the National Conciliation Plan. Kisula Ngoye emerged as the new governor of the province.

JULY 11

HARPER LEE PUBLISHED HER NOVEL TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

The flight’s planned route took the plane northbound from England over the international waters of Arctic Ocean, where the plane turned east and entered the Barents Sea, northeast of Norway, and continued a track about 50 miles from the Soviet-held Kola Peninsula – all the while over international waters.

In the final, Yugoslavia scored first, but the Soviet Union, led by legendary goalkeeper Lev Yashin, equalized in the 49th minute. After 90 minutes the score was 1–1, and Viktor Ponedelnik scored with seven minutes left in extra time to give the Soviets the inaugural European Championship.

In the ten years between 1950 to 1960, the Soviet Union had a history of shadowing, “escorting”, and every now and then, shooting down American planes flying over international waters near its borders. In 10 separate incidents, about 75 US Navy and Air Force air crewmen lost their lives flying routine reconnaissance missions. Among such incidents were the shootdown of a Navy bomber over the Baltic in the spring of 1950, and an Air Force C-130 transport that was lured by false radio beams into Soviet Armenia, which was shot down in September 1958.

JULY 11

Soviet pilot Vasiliy Polyakov was on strip alert when he was scrambled flying his MiG-19 fighter, assigned to the 206th Air Division, to intercept an intruding plane north of Murmansk, and west of Novaya Zemlya, in the Barents Sea. He turned toward the plane on an intercept course, but passed about three miles behind it. He approached the plane and was able to identified it visually as an American bomber.

The declaration of independence was made with the support of Belgian business interests and over 6,000 Belgian troops. Tshombe was known to be close to the Belgian industrial companies which mined the rich resources of copper, gold and uranium. Katanga was one of the richest and most developed areas of the Congo. Without Katanga, Congo would lose a large part of its mineral assets and consequently government income. The view of the Congolese central government and a large section of international opinion was that this was an attempt to create a Belgian-controlled puppet-state run for the benefit of the mining interests. Paradoxically, not even Belgium officially recognised the new state despite providing it with military assistance. The Luba were divided, with one faction under Ndaye Emanuel supporting secession and another under Kisula Ngoye supporting the central government.

The radar course plotted by Capt. McKone called for a turn to the northeast at about 50 miles off Holy Nose Cape at the bottom of the Kola Peninsula; however, the Soviet MiG had returned and was now flying in close formation - 40 feet - off the right wing of the RB-47. He rocked the wings of his MiG in an attempt to signal the Stratojet to land.

JULY 10

MOISE TSHOMBE DECLARES THE CONGOLESE PROVINCE OF KATANGA INDEPENDENT. HE REQUESTS AND RECEIVES HELP FROM BELGIUM.

It’s a disconcerting tale of alleged injustice in small-town Alabama. A museum dedicated to Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird is fighting a lawsuit, brought by the author, which accuses it of profiting illegally from the title of her widely beloved book.

Lee, who is 87 and reportedly in poor health, filed the lawsuit last week, claiming that the Monroe County Heritage Museum had tried “to confuse, mislead and deceive the public” into thinking she had approved and endorsed its range of To Kill A Mockingbird-branded merchandise.

The author has said in the past that Maycomb, the town depicted in the novel, was based on Monroeville, Alabama, where the popular, 25-year-old museum is located. Its property includes an old courthouse, on which the set for the 1962 film adaptation was based. Its website address is tokillamockingbird.com. The museum generated more than $500,000 (£309,000) in revenue in 2011, claiming in its tax documents that its purpose is primarily historical. Lee’s lawsuit alleges, however, that “its actual work does not touch upon history.

Rather, its primary mission is to trade upon the fictional story, settings and characters that Harper Lee created.”

In September 1960, Prime Minister Lumumba was replaced in a coup d’état. On 17 January 1961, Lumumba was sent to Lubumbashi, capital of Katanga, where he was tortured and executed shortly after arrival. Belgian officers, under Katangese command, were present at the execution.

THE SOVIET UNION NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM DEFEATS THE YUGOSLAVIAN NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM 2–1 IN PARIS TO WIN THE FIRST EUROPEAN SOCCER CHAMPIONSHIP.

The tournament was a knockout competition; just 17 teams entered with some notable absences, West Germany, Italy and England among them.

The teams would play home-and-away matches until the semi-finals; the final four teams would move on to the final tournament, whose host was selected after the teams became known.

You can relive The Champ’s glory by purchasing a special limited edition...

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The museum’s lawyer Matthew Goforth refuted the allegations, telling Reuters, “Every single statement in the lawsuit is either false, meritless, or both … I find it curious that her handlers suddenly want to profit by suing the museum for essentially preserving and promoting what Ms Lee helped accomplish for this community.”

The UN Security Council met in the wake of Lumumba’s death in a highly emotional atmosphere charged with anti-colonial feeling and rhetoric. On 21 February 1961 the Security Council adopted resolution 161, which authorised ‘all appropriate measures’ to ‘prevent the occurrence of civil war in the Congo, including ... the use of force, if necessary, in the last resort’. This resolution demanded the expulsion from the Congo of all Belgian troops and foreign mercenaries, but did not explicitly mandate the UN to conduct offensive operations.

This resolution was ultimately interpreted by the local UN forces justify military operations to end the secession of Katanga. Despite this new resolution during the next six months the UN undertook no major military operations instead concentrating on facilitating several rounds of political negotiations.

If Lee’s lawsuit is successful, it could put the museum out of business. Stephanie Rogers, its executive director, told The Hollywood Reporter she had not read the suit. “The museum has been doing what we always have done,” Rogers said.

“We honour her here. We don’t sell anything with her name. We sell memorabilia to those who come to see a production of To Kill a Mockingbird that we secure dramatic rights to. Everything we do is above board. I’m shocked by this.”

To Kill A Mockingbird remains Nelle Harper Lee’s only published book. It won her a Nobel Prize, while the film version won Gregory Peck an Academy Award for Best Actor. Peck played Atticus Finch, a small-town “Jim Crow”-era lawyer, who defends an African-American man wrongly accused of rape.

Since its original publication in 1960, the book has sold more than 30 million copies in more than 25 languages.

In June, Tshombe signed a pledge to reunite Katanga with rest of the country however, by August it was clear he had no intention to implement this agreement. In August and September, the UN conducted two operations to arrest and repatriate the mercenaries and political advisors by force. The second operation was resisted by the Katangese Gendarmerie and resulted in casualties on both sides.

The lawsuit says Lee, who recently suffered a stroke, now resides in an assisted living facility in Monroeville. This is not the first time she has challenged the museum’s legitimacy.

Peace negotiations ensued, in the course of which, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld died in uncertain circumstances in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

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These were especially significant because Belgium’s invasion violated the norm of sovereignty, and the second objective was set to prevent the country from becoming a Cold War proxy state.

The first troops reached Congo on 15 July, many airlifted in by the United States Air Force.

JULY 13

Afterward, Robert Kennedy visited with labor leaders who were extremely unhappy with the choice of Johnson and after seeing the depth of labor opposition to Johnson, he ran messages between the hotel suites of his brother and Johnson, apparently trying to undermine the proposed ticket without John Kennedy’s authorization and to get Johnson to agree to be the Democratic Party chairman rather than vice president. Johnson refused to accept a change in plans unless it came directly from John Kennedy.

THE U.S. SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY IS NOMINATED FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AT THE 1960 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION IN LOS ANGELES. The 1960 Democratic National Convention was held in Los Angeles, California. In the week before the convention opened, Kennedy received two new challengers when Lyndon B. Johnson, the powerful Senate Majority Leader from Texas, and Adlai Stevenson, the party’s nominee in 1952 and 1956, officially announced their candidacies (they had both privately been working for the nomination for some time). However, neither Johnson nor Stevenson was a match for the talented and highly efficient Kennedy campaign team led by Robert F. Kennedy. Johnson challenged Kennedy to a televised debate before a joint meeting of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations; Kennedy accepted. Most observers felt that Kennedy won the debate, and Johnson was not able to expand his delegate support beyond the South. Stevenson’s failure to launch his candidacy publicly until the week of the convention meant that many liberal delegates who might have supported him were already pledged to Kennedy, and Stevenson - despite the energetic support of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt - was unable to break their allegiance. Kennedy won the nomination on the first ballot.

Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, dissatisfied with Dag Hammarskjöld’s refusal to use UN troops to subdue the insurrection in Katanga, decided to attempt an invasion of Katanga on his own and turned to the Soviet Union for help. The invasion attempt never reached Katanga but led to dissension within the Central Government, the collapse of the Central Government, and eventually to Patrice Lumumba’s arrest in December.

In February 1961, the legally elected Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was killed, and only then did the United Nations Security Council explicitly authorize the use of force for purposes beyond self-defense.

JULY 21

FRANCIS CHICHESTER, ENGLISH NAVIGATOR AND YACHTSMAN, ARRIVES AT NEW YORK CITY ABOARD HIS YACHT, GYPSY MOTH II, CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN SOLO IN A NEW RECORD OF JUST FORTY DAYS. Organised single-handed yacht racing was pioneered by Britons “Blondie” Hasler and Francis Chichester, who conceived the idea of a single-handed race across the Atlantic Ocean. This was a revolutionary concept at the time, as the idea was thought to be extremely impractical,

Despite his brother’s interference, John Kennedy was firm that Johnson was who he wanted as running mate and met with staffers such as Larry O’Brien, his national campaign manager, to say Johnson was to be vice-president. O’Brien recalled later that John Kennedy’s words were wholly unexpected, but that after a brief consideration of the electoral vote situation, he thought “it was a stroke of genius”.

JULY 14

THE UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL DECIDES TO SEND TROOPS TO KATANGA TO OVERSEE THE WITHDRAWAL OF BELGIAN TROOPS. Congo became independent in 30 June 1960, but the Belgian commander refused to “Africanize” the officers’ corps of the Force Publique (the army), and because of that disorder and mutinies broke out. While the President and the Prime Minister were trying to negotiate with the mutineers, the Belgian government decided to intervene to protect Belgians that remained in the country at the request of Moïse Tshombé, who advocated independence for Katanga, one of the richest provinces in the country due to an abundance of minerals.

Then, in a move that surprised many, Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate. Kennedy realized that he could not be elected without support of traditional Southern Democrats, most of whom had backed Johnson. Kennedy offered Johnson the vice-presidential nomination at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel at 10:15 a.m. on July 14, 1960, the morning after being nominated for president. Robert F. Kennedy, who hated Johnson for his attacks on the Kennedy family, said later that his brother offered the position to Johnson as a courtesy and did not expect him to accept. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Seymour Hersh quote Robert Kennedy’s version of events, writing that John Kennedy would have preferred Stuart Symington as his running-mate and that Johnson teamed with House Speaker Sam Rayburn to pressure Kennedy to offer the nomination. Biographers Robert Caro and W. Marvin Watson offer a different perspective; they write that the Kennedy campaign was desperate to win what was forecast to be a very close race against Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge II. Johnson was needed on the ticket to help carry Texas and the Southern states. Caro’s research showed that on July 14, John Kennedy started the process while Johnson was still asleep.

At 6:30 a.m. John Kennedy asked Robert Kennedy to prepare an estimate of upcoming electoral votes, “including Texas.”

On July 10, Belgian troops were sent to Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga, to control the situation and protect Belgian civilians. With the help of the Belgians, Tshombé proclaimed the independence of the province. On 12 July, the President and the Prime Minister asked for help of the UN. The Secretary-General addressed the Security Council at a night meeting on 13 July and asked the Council to act “with utmost speed” on the request.

At the same meeting, the Security Council adopted resolution 143 (1960), by which it called upon the Government of Belgium to withdraw its troops from the territory of the Congo. The resolution authorized the United Nations Secretary-General to facilitate the withdrawal of Belgian troops, maintain law and order, and help to establish and legitimize the post-colonial government. This mandate was extended to maintain the territorial integrity of Congo, through particularly the removal of the foreign mercenaries supporting the secession of Katanga. ONUC’s intention was an unprecedented role for a UN peacekeeping force, as it was not self-evidently peacekeeping in nature.

Robert called Pierre Salinger and Kenneth O’Donnell to assist him. Realizing the ramifications of counting Texas votes as their own, Salinger asked him whether he was considering a Kennedy-Johnson ticket, and Robert replied, yes. Some time between 9 and 10 a.m., John Kennedy called Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence, a Johnson backer, to request that Lawrence nominate Johnson for vice-president if Johnson were to accept the role and then went to Johnson’s suite to discuss a mutual ticket at 10:15 a.m. John Kennedy then returned to his suite to announce the Kennedy-Johnson ticket to his closest supporters and Northern political bosses. He accepted the congratulations of Ohio governor Michael DiSalle, Connecticut governor Abraham A. Ribicoff, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and New York mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr.. Lawrence said that “Johnson has the strength where you need it most”; he then left to begin writing the nomination speech.

Following Security Council actions, the United Nations Force in the Congo (ONUC) was established.

To carry out these tasks, the Secretary-General set up a United Nations Force, which at its peak strength numbered nearly 20,000. The UN Force stayed in the Congo between 1960 and 1964, and underwent a transition from a peacekeeping presence to a military force.

O’Donnell remembers being angry at what he considered a betrayal by John Kennedy, who had previously cast Johnson as anti-labor and anti-liberal.

ONUC’s main goals stayed consistent from the first to fifth resolution. It featured the double purpose of withdrawing Belgian military personnel (later expanding to mercenaries) and providing military assistance to ensure internal stability. The successive Security Council resolutions added to and elaborated on the initial mandate but did not fundamentally change the operation’s objectives.

cap from New Era, designed with the help of Muhammad Ali...

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JULY 20

CEYLON ELECTS MRS SIRIMAVO BANDARANAIKE AS ITS PRIME MINISTER, THE WORLD’S FIRST ELECTED FEMALE HEAD OF GOVERNMENT. Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow of Ceylon’s assassinated prime minister Solomon Bandaranaike, has become the world’s first woman prime minister.

Her Sri Lanka Freedom Party won a resounding victory in the general election taking 75 out of 150 seats. Mrs Bandaranaike only entered politics after her husband was shot by an extremist Buddhist on 26 September 1959. She has become known as the “weeping widow” for frequently bursting into tears during the election campaign and vowing to continue her late husband’s socialist policies.

This week’s election was called after Dudley Senanayake’s United National Party failed to produce a working majority after winning elections in March. Mrs Bandaranaike was born into the Ceylon aristocracy and her husband was a landowner.

She was educated by Roman Catholic nuns at St Bridget’s school in the capital, Colombo, and is a practising Buddhist. She married in 1940 aged 24 and has three children - and until her husband’s death seemed content in her role as mother and retiring wife. Her SLFP aims to represent the “little man” although its policies during the campaign were not clear.

Mr Bandaranaike attributed her success to the “people’s love and respect” for her late husband and urged her supporters to practise “simple living, decorum and dignity”. Her husband came to power in 1955, eight years after independence, and declared himself a Buddhist which appealed to nationalists. But his government was wracked by infighting among Sinhalese and Tamils and lacked direction.

Mrs Bandaranaike inherits a country in a state of flux and her party’s proposed programme of nationalisation may bring her into conflict with foreign interests in commodities like tea, rubber and oil.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike made Sinhalese the language of government - which angered the minority Tamils - and brought schools under state secular control.

particularly in the adverse conditions of their proposed route - a westward crossing of the north Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, their original halfcrown bet on first place developed into the first single-handed transatlantic yacht race, the OSTAR, which was held in 1960. The race was a success, and was won in 40 days by Chichester, then aged 58, in Gipsy Moth III; Hasler finished second, in 48 days, sailing the junk-rigged Jester. Hasler’s windvane self-steering gear revolutionised short-handed sailing, and his other major innovation- using a junk rig for safer and more manageable shorthanded sailing - influenced many subsequent sailors.

Chichester placed second in the second running of the race four years later. The winner on that occasion, Eric Tabarly, sailed in the first ever boat specifically designed for single-handed ocean racing, the 44-foot (13 m) ketch Pen Duick II.

Not content with his achievements, Chichester set his sights on the next logical goal - a racing-style circumnavigation of the world. In 1966 he set off in Gipsy Moth IV, a yacht custom-built for a speed attempt, in order to set the fastest possible time for a round-the-world trip - in effect, the first speed record for a single-handed circumnavigation. He followed the clipper route from Plymouth, United Kingdom, to Sydney, Australia, where he stopped over for 48 days, then continued south of Cape Horn back to Plymouth.

In the process he became the first single-handed sailor to circumnavigate west-to-east, by the clipper route, with just one stop (of 48 days) in 274 days overall, with a sailing time of 226 days, twice as fast as the previous record for a small vessel. At the age of 65, Chichester had once again revolutionised single-handed sailing. The first single-handed round-the-world yacht race and actually the first round-the-world yacht race in any format was the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, starting between June 1 and October 31 (the skippers set off at different times) in 1968.

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Subsequently in November 1960 Diori was elected to the new position of President of Niger by the National Assembly. During his presidency, Diori’s government favored the maintenance of traditional social structures and the retention of close economic ties with France. He was re-elected unopposed in 1965 and 1970.

AUGUST 01

DAHOMEY BECOMES INDEPENDENT FROM FRANCE. Dahomey was a French colony of and a part of French West Africa from 1904 to 1958. Under the French, a port was constructed at Cotonou, and railroads were built. School facilities were expanded by Roman Catholic missions. In 1946, Dahomey became an overseas territory with its own parliament and representation in the French national assembly. On December 4, 1958, it became the République du Dahomey, self-governing within the French Community. On 11 July 1960 France agreed to Dahomey becoming fully independent. Dahomey declared independence on 1 August 1960.

For over six hundred years the city of Benin was the capital of a prosperous, well-organized empire of the same name. At its peak during the 14th and 15th centuries, the empire stretched from Dahomey to the Niger River and reached as far south as the coast. In 1170 A.D. a prince from the city of Ife named Oranmiyan founded the monarchy of Benin. His son, Eweka I, became the first Oba (king).

The present ruler, Erediauwa I, is the 39th Oba of the dynasty.

The palace in Benin was the height of a complex feudal society characterized by widespread competition for power, prestige and wealth. The arrival of the Portuguese around 1485 created a new era of prosperity and rapid expansion. The Portuguese provided economic and militaristic strength for the kingdom, acting as a conduit for overseas trade and fighting in Benin military campaigns.

In the early 17th century a dynastic dispute resulted in the establishment of two rival states at Abomey and Porto-Novo. The first of these grew into the Kingdom of Dahomey, which dominated the area until the 19th century.

In 1704, France received permission to erect a port at Ouidah, and in 1752 the Portuguese founded Porto Novo. On June 22, 1894, the territory was named by decree the “Colony of Dahomey and its dependences” and was granted autonomy which it retained until October 18, 1904 when it became part of French West Africa. On December 4, 1958 the Republic was proclaimed. Dahomey became independent on August 1, 1960 and is a UN member country.

If the first independent Government was ousted by a military coup on October 28, 1963, Dahomey, during the ensuing years up to 1972, went through a lot of political upheavals that always climaxed in military coups. That of October 26, 1972 was the starting point of a 17-year regime which three years later went red with a Marxist Leninist ideology. In other words, on November 30, 1975 Dahomey was under a centrally controlled government and eventually became the People’s Republic of Benin.

AUGUST 03

NIGER BECOMES INDEPENDENT FROM FRANCE. On 11 July 1960 France agreed to Niger becoming fully independent. The French Fifth Republic passed a revision of the French Community allowing membership of independent states. On 28 July the Nigerien Legislative Assembly became the Nigerien National Assembly. Independence was declared on 3 August 1960 under the leadership of Prime Minister Diori.

Upper Volta became an autonomous republic in the French community on December 11, 1958.

On July 11, 1960 France agreed to Upper Volta becoming fully independent.

AUGUST 07

Diori gained worldwide respect for his role as a spokesman for African affairs and as a popular arbitrator in conflicts involving other African nations. Domestically, however, his administration was rife with corruption, and the government was unable to implement much-needed reforms or to alleviate the widespread famine brought on by the Sahelian drought of the early 1970s. Increasingly criticized at home for his negligence in domestic matters, Diori put down a coup in 1963 and narrowly escaped assassination in 1965. Faced with an attempted military coup and attacks by members of Sawaba, he used French advisers and troops to repress opposition, despite student and union protests against French neocolonialism.

However, his relationship with France suffered when his government voiced dissatisfaction with the level of investment in uranium production when French President Georges Pompidou visited Niger in 1972.

The PPN functioned as a platform for a handful of Politburo leaders grouped around Diori and his advisors Boubou Hama and Diamballa Maiga, who were largely unchanged from their first election in 1956. By 1974 the party had not held a congress since 1959 (one was scheduled for late 1974 during the famine induced political crisis, but never held). The PPN election lists were made up of traditional rulers from the main ethnic regions who, upon election to the Assembly, were given only ceremonial power. Ethnic tensions, too, mounted duiring Diori’s regime. The Politburo and successive cabinents were made up almost exclusively of Djerma, Songhai and Maouri ethnic groups from the west of the country, the same ethnic base the French had promoted during colonial rule. No Politburo ever contained a member of Hausa or Fula groups, even though the Hausa were the plurality of the population, forming over 40% of Nigeriens.

Widespread civil disorder followed allegations that some government ministers were misappropriating stocks of food aid and accused Diori of consolidating power. Diori limited cabinet appointments to fellow Djerma, family members, and close friends. In addition, he acquired new powers by declaring himself the minister of foreign and defense affairs.

AUGUST 05

UPPER VOLTA, BECOMES INDEPENDENT FROM FRANCE.

The French first penetrated Chad in 1891, establishing their authority through military expeditions primarily against the Muslim kingdoms. The first major colonial battle for Chad was fought in 1900 between the French Major Lamy and the African leader Rabah, both of whom were killed in the battle. Although the French won that battle, they did not declare the territory pacified until 1911; armed clashes between colonial troops and local bands continued for many years thereafter.

THE WORLDS FIRST STANDARD GAUGE PASSENGER PRESERVED RAILWAY, THE BLUEBELL RAILWAY, OPENS TO THE PUBLIC.

In 1905, administrative responsibility for Chad was placed under a governor general stationed at Brazzaville in what is now Congo. Although Chad joined the French colonies of Gabon, Oubangui-Charo, and Moyen Congo to form the Federation of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) in 1910,

The Bluebell Railway is a heritage line running for nine miles along the border between East Sussex and West Sussex, England. Steam trains are operated between Sheffield Park, with two intermediate stations at Horsted Keynes and Kingscote, and then into East Grinstead. The line was set up for preservation in 1960 by with help from Bernard Holden MBE.

it did not have colonial status until 1920. The northern region of Chad was occupied by the French in 1914. In 1959, the territory of French Equatorial Africa was dissolved, and four states-Gabon, the Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), and Chad--became autonomous members of the French Community. On August 11, 1960 Chad became an independent nation under its first president, Francois Tombalbaye.

In the television series, the Bluebell Railway is a branch line on Sodor, close to the Skarloey Railway.

long civil war began as a tax revolt in 1965 and soon set the Muslim north and east against the southern-led government. Even with the help of French combat forces, the Tombalbaye government was never able to quell the insurgency. Tombalbaye’s rule became more irrational and brutal, leading the military to carry out a coup in 1975 and to install Gen. Felix Malloum, a southerner, as head of state. In 1978, Malloum’s government was broadened to include more northerners.

Stepney was the first engine to be rescued by the Bluebell Railway.

The railway is managed and run largely by volunteers. It has the largest collection of steam locomotives in the UK after the National Railway Museum (NRM) (though the Midland Railway, Butterley owns more locomotives after the collection overall), and a collection of almost 150 carriages and wagons (most of them from before or between the world wars), unrivaled in the south of England.

In addition to the 30+ locomotives resident on the line, one is on loan from the NRM (another has recently returned there), and a project is well under way to recreate a long-lost type of locomotive (a London, Brighton and South Coast Railway H2 Class Atlantic) from a few surviving parts.

Internal dissent within the government led the northern prime minister, Hissein Habre, to send his forces against the national army in the capital city of N’Djamena in February 1979. The resulting civil war amongst the 11 emergent factions was so widespread that it rendered the central government largely irrelevant. At that point, other African governments decided to intervene.

The Bluebell Railway was the first preserved standard gauge steam-operated passenger railway in the world: it opened on 7 August 1960, shortly after the line from East Grinstead to Lewes had been closed by British Railways. It also preserved a number of steam locomotives even before the cessation of steam service on British mainline railways in 1968.

AUGUST 11

CHAD BECOMES INDEPENDENT FROM FRANCE.

When the French arrived and claimed the area in 1896, Mossi resistance ended with the capture of their capital at Ouagadougou. In 1919, certain provinces from Ivory Coast were united into French Upper Volta in the French West Africa federation. In 1932, the new colony was split up for economic reasons; it was reconstituted in 1937 as an administrative division called the Upper Coast.

After World War II, the Mossi actively pressured the French for separate territorial status and on September 4, 1947, Upper Volta became a French West African territory again in its own right.

A revision in the organization of French Overseas Territories began with the passage of the Basic Law (Loi Cadre) of July 23, 1956. This act was followed by reorganizational measures approved by the French parliament early in 1957 that ensured a large degree of self-government for individual territories.

A series of four international conferences held first under Nigerian and then Organization of African Unity (OAU) sponsorship attempted to bring the Chadian factions together. At the fourth conference, held in Lagos, Nigeria, in August 1979, the Lagos accord was signed. This accord established a transitional government pending national elections. In November 1979, the National Union Transition Government (GUNT) was created with a mandate to govern for 18 months. Goukouni Oueddei, a northerner, was named President; Colonel Kamougue, a southerner, Vice President; and Habre, Minister of Defense. This coalition proved fragile; in January 1980, fighting broke out again between Goukouni’s and Habre’s forces. With assistance from Libya, Goukouni regained control of the capital and other urban centers by year’s end. However, Goukouni’s January 1981 statement that Chad and Libya had agreed to work for the realization of complete unity between the two countries generated intense international pressure and Goukouni’s subsequent call for the complete withdrawal of external forces.

Chad has a long and rich history. A humanoid skull found in Borkou was dated to be more than 3 million years old. Because in ancient times the Saharan area was not totally arid, Chad’s population was more evenly distributed than it is today. For example, 7,000 years ago, the north central basin, now in the Sahara, was still filled with water, and people lived and farmed around its shores. Cliff paintings in Borkou and Ennedi depict elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, cattle, and camels; only camels survive there today. The region has been known to traders and geographers since the late Middle Ages. Since then, Chad has served as a crossroads for the Muslim peoples of the desert and savanna regions, and the animist Bantu tribes of the tropical forests.

Sao people lived along the Chari River for thousands of years, but their relatively weak chiefdoms were overtaken by the powerful chiefs of what were to become the Kanem-Bornu and Baguirmi kingdoms. At their peak, these two kingdoms and the kingdom of Ouaddai controlled a good part of what is now Chad, as well as parts of Nigeria and Sudan. From 1500 to 1900, Arab slave raids were widespread.

himself. Give us your best Ali impersonation and you can...

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already undergone various testing and their physiology and reactions were familiar to the scientists.

Adding up to that, stray dogs were unassuming, easygoing and open to taming; years of life in the street was their strong point, as it had taught them to survive in extreme conditions.

AUGUST 16

THE MEDITERRANEAN ISLAND OF CYPRUS RECEIVES ITS INDEPENDENCE FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM.

The candidates had to also meet physical requirements to fit into the small cockpit -- namely to be no heavier than 13 pounds and 14 inches in height. As the dogs were undoubtedly meant to become instant celebrities and media figures, the scientists were also trying to look for pretty muzzles with a possible touch of wisdom.

The earliest known human activity on the island dates to around the 10th millennium BC. Archaeological remains from this period include the well-preserved Neolithic village of Khirokitia, and Cyprus is home to some of the oldest water wells in the world. Cyprus was settled by Mycenean Greeks in two waves in the 2nd millennium BC. As a strategic location in the Middle East, it was subsequently occupied by several major powers, including the empires of the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians, from whom the island was seized in 333 BC by Alexander the Great.

The training field was set up in a stadium, in an old hotel, and all the training and the actual missions were strictly confidential, as most of the experiments were unsuccessful. The dogs, launched into space, kept dying from pressurization loop, parachute mechanism failure or faults in the life support system, but both scientists and authorities excused the deaths by saying the dogs died in the name of science.

Subsequent rule by Ptolemaic Egypt, the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, Arab caliphates for a short period, the French Lusignan dynasty, and the Venetians, was followed by over three centuries of Ottoman control. Cyprus was placed under British administration in 1878 until it was granted independence in 1960, becoming a member of the Commonwealth the following year. In 1974, seven years after the intercommunal violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, an attempted coup d’état by Greek Cypriot nationalists and elements of the Greek military junta with the aim of achieving enosis (union of the island with Greece) took place.Turkey used this as a pretext to invade the northern portion of the island.

Unfortunately the Indra Club (64 Grosse Freiheit) was closed, so a manager from a neighbouring club found someone to open it up, and the group slept on the red leather seats in the alcoves. The group played at the club on the same night, but were told they could sleep in a small cinema’s storeroom, which was cold and noisy, being directly behind the screen of the cinema, the Bambi Kino (33 Paul-Roosen Strasse).

McCartney later said, “We lived backstage in the Bambi Kino, next to the toilets, and you could always smell them. The room had been an old storeroom, and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of paint; and two sets of bunk beds, with not very much covers Union Jack flags we were frozen.”

Lennon remembered: “We were put in this pigsty.

We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We’d go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show and old German fraus [women] pissing next door.” After having been awoken in this fashion, the group were then obliged to use cold water from the urinals for washing and shaving. They were paid £2.50 each a day, seven days a week, playing from 8:30-9:30, 10 until 11, 11:30-12:30, and finishing the evening playing from one until two o’clock in the morning. German customers found the group’s name comical, as “Beatles” sounded like “Peedles”, which meant a small boy’s penis.

Turkish forces remained after a cease-fire, resulting in the partition of the island; an objective of Turkey since 1955. The intercommunal violence and subsequent Turkish invasion led to the displacement of over 150,000 Greek Cypriots and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots, and the establishment of a separate Turkish Cypriots political entity in the north. These events and the resulting political situation are matters of a continuing dispute.

AUGUST 17

THE NEWLY NAMED BEATLES BEGIN A 48-NIGHT RESIDENCY AT THE INDRA CLUB IN HAMBURG, WEST GERMANY.

Harrison remembered the Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit as the best thing the group had ever seen, as it had so many neon lights, clubs and restaurants, although also saying, “The whole area was full of transvestites and prostitutes and gangsters, but I couldn’t say that they were the audience.

Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.” Best remembered the Indra as being a depressing place that was filled with a few tourists, and having heavy, old, red curtains that made it seem shabby compared to the larger Kaiserkeller, a club also owned

by Koschmider and located nearby at 36 Grosse Freiheit. After the closure of the Indra because of complaints about the noise, the Beatles played in the Kaiserkeller, starting on 4 October 1960.

The Beatles members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best regularly performed at different clubs in Hamburg, West Germany, during the period from August 1960 to December 1962; a chapter in the group’s history which honed their performance skills, widened their reputation, and led to their first recording, which brought them to the attention of Brian Epstein.

The Beatles’ booking agent, Allan Williams, decided to send the group to Hamburg when another group he managed, Derry and the Seniors, proved successful there. Having no permanent drummer at the time, they recruited Best a few days before their departure. After breaking their contract by playing at another club, Harrison was deported for being under-age, and McCartney and Best were arrested and deported for attempted arson (after McCartney and Best had set fire to a condom in their living quarters).

THE TRIAL OF THE AMERICAN U - 2 PILOT FRANCIS GARY POWERS BEGINS IN MOSCOW.

The court heard Powers was equipped with emergency gear, including money and gold, and there was a mechanism on the plane for destroying it to avoid capture. He also carried a poisoned pin to enable him to commit suicide in case of torture.

Powers told the court he was offered a well-paid job with the CIA after leaving the US Air Force.

He was told his work would involve flying along the borders of the Soviet Union with the purpose of picking up any radio or radar information.

Powers was asked if he now regretted making his last flight. He replied, “yes, very much”.

He also apologised for the damage to US/Soviet relations. His plane was shot down on the eve of a superpower summit in Paris, which was subsequently called off. A visit by President Dwight Eisenhower to the Soviet Union was also cancelled.

In his final speech to the court, prosecutor Roman Rudenko outspokenly attacked the United States as inspirers and organisers of what he called “monstrous crimes” against peace.

He said the US had demonstrated “the real intention of making use of the provocative incursion of the U-2 plane into the Soviet air space as a pretext for wrecking a summit meeting, plunging the world again into the state of cold war, aggravating the tensions in international relations and putting a brake on the Great Powers’ talks on disarmament”.

THE SOVIET UNION LAUNCHES THE SATELLITE SPUTNIK 5, WITH THE DOGS BELKA AND STRELKA

Powers had pleaded guilty to spying for the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after his plane was shot down on 1 May at an altitude of about 68,000 ft (20,760 m), south of Sverdlovsk, 850 miles (1,368 km) east of Moscow.

The charge sheet said the route taken by Powers “left no doubt that it was a deliberate intrusion into the air space of the Soviet Union with hostile purposes”.

On August 19, 1960, the Soviet stray dogs Belka and Strelka won themselves worldwide fame and glory after successfully performing a 24-hour Earth orbit on the Vostok spacecraft and returning back on Earth safe and sound.

After the first Sputnik had been launched into orbit in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev demanded from Sergey Korolev, the head of the Soviet space program, another feat, just as epoch-making. The request resulted in Korolev’s decision to launch another Sputnik with a dog on it.

Powers told the court the U-2 was designed and built for high-altitude flights. He had been told it could fly beyond the reach of anti-aircraft fire.

The Beatles arrived very early in the morning of 17 August 1960, but had no trouble finding the St. Pauli area of Hamburg, as it was so infamous.

Powers was asked why he made the 1 May flight.

He said he assumed he was looking for rocket launching sites.

AUGUST 19

The United States pilot, Francis Gary Powers, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Soviet military court.

In the early 1960s, the Hamburg scene revolved around the Kaiserkeller, Top Ten, Star-Club, BeerShop, Mambo, Holle, Wagabond (pronounced vagabond in German) and the Pacific Hotel, as well as the less popular clubs like Grannies, the Ice Cream Shop, Chugs, and Sacha’s. The Reeperbahn and the Grosse Freiheit were decorated with neon lights, with posters advertising the performers in the clubs. Each club had a doorman whose job was to entice customers inside, as the drinks were expensive (for Babycham and watered-down beer).

Customers who would not, or could not afford to pay were dealt with severely by being beaten and then thrown out.

In the wreckage of the U-2 were found films of Soviet airfields and other important military and industrial targets. A tape recording was found of the signals of certain Soviet radar stations.

Powers’ wife Barbara and parents have been in court since the trial began three days ago. They are hoping to appeal against the sentence.

AUGUST 17

The Beatles first met Astrid Kirchherr in Hamburg, who was instrumental in their adoption of the famous Beatle haircut. During their time in Hamburg, Sutcliffe decided to leave the group to continue his studies. In April 1962, less than a year after leaving the group, he died of a brain hemorrhage.

He described the moment the plane was hit: “I felt a hollow-sounding explosion. It was behind and there was a kind of orange flash.”

The first dog cosmonauts were chosen from a wide selection of the stray dogs the scientists collected from streets and backyards. They were deemed the most suitable candidates since they had

win some incredible prizes. Or purchase a framed print, personally autographed by Ali.

On August 20, 1960, it was proudly announced that “the space craft performed a non-destructive landing, returning Belka and Strelka to Earth safe and sound.” As the mission was successful, the information about all the preparatory work was allowed to be published in the newspapers, which said that “the dogs passed all sorts of tests; they learned to spend significant amounts of time motionless in the cockpit; they were trained to withstand overloads and vibrations. The animals are no longer afraid of the buzzing, they know how to operate in their uniforms, allowing to monitor heart rate, brain impulses, blood pressure, and breathing and such properly.”

Several days afterward, Belka and Strelka’s flight was broadcast on television. The audience could clearly see how the dogs were doing somersaults in zero gravity. While Strelka was always stressed and on guard, Belka was enjoying herself, frolicking and barking. The scientists even regretted they hadn’t installed microphones, which would have made it an even better story. After the flight, Belka and Strelka were welcome guests in every part of the country, especially popular with children, as they were taken to kindergartens, schools and orphanages.

At press conferences, all journalists were anxious to touch and pat the dogs. They were warned, however, that like any star, the dogs were temperamental and could bite them.

After the flight Strelka gave birth twice, her puppies being just as popular as their mom. Every puppy stayed at the institute and was closely monitored. One of Strelka’s babies, shaggy Pushok, was given as a gift to U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline. Belka and Strelka spent the rest of their lives at the institute and died of old age.

After Belka and Strelka, several more dogs were launched into space, the last one coming back successfully 18 days before Yury Gagarin’s flight.

AUGUST 25

THE 1960 SUMMER OLYMPIC GAMES BEGIN IN ROME. For the first time ever the Olympics were televised around the world and it could be argued that the Games truly began its journey to the mega event they are today.

Rome owed the Olympics. It was a Roman emperor, Theodosius II, who had brought the ancient Olympics to an abrupt halt in 393AD because he considered them to be pagan.

Fittingly, the Romans blended the old and new.

They built a brand-new Olympic Stadium that could hold 100,000 but also converted magnificent ancient buildings for other competitions, such as gymnastics and wrestling, held in the Basilica of Maxentius, which had staged the same event 2,000 years earlier.

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MUHAMMAD ALI WINS THE GOLD MEDAL IN LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT BOXING. SEPTEMBER 05

The moment that launched the career of the greatest athlete the world has ever known very nearly didn’t happen. A fear of flying meant Cassius Clay tried to withdraw from the 1960 Olympic Games just weeks before the US team travelled to Rome.

He asked if he could make his way there by train.

When told neither was possible he decided he could do without the Olympic Games. He was destined for greatness with or without a medal dangling from his neck.

The 18-year-old from Louisville had been on planes before. He just didn’t like them very much.

A rocky flight to California for the Olympic trials cemented his view that, aside from when he was dancing in the ring, his feet should remain on the ground. In later years he became a master of disguising his fears (of Sonny Liston, George Foreman or Joe Frazier) but the teenage Clay had no qualms revealing he was scared. He asked if he could go to Rome by sea.

In the end it took a meeting with Joe Martin in Louisville’s Central Park to convince him to travel.

Martin was the policeman and boxing trainer who told a pepped-up 12-year-old that if he really wanted to deal with the thief who stole his bike, he should first learn how to fight.

“He was afraid of flying,” Martin told an HBO Muhammad Ali special. “We had a rough flight going to California for the trials and so when it

came to go to Rome he said he wasn’t gonna fly, and that he wouldn’t go. I said: ‘Well, you’ll lose the opportunity of being a great fighter,’ and he said: ‘Well, I’m not gonna go.’ He wanted to take a boat or something. Anyway I finally took him out to Central Park here in Louisville and we had a long talk for a couple or three hours, and I calmed him down and convinced him if he wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, then he had to go to Rome and win the Olympics.”

The only hype and fanfare came from Clay himself, but behind the brash statements was a training regime that was anything but amateur. Training began each day at 4am as he pounded his steeltoed work boots through the deadened streets of Louisville. John Powell, who worked at a liquor dispensary, told Sports Illustrated of the shadowy figure who came trudging the streets in the dead of night.

“I’d be sitting on the counter,” Powell said, “and I could see his shadow coming around the corner from Grand Avenue. Clay was on his way to Chicksaw Park. Cold, dark winter mornings. You could see that shadow coming. Then here he comes, running by, with those big old army brogans. He’d be the onliest person in the early morning. And I’d walk outside, and he’d stop and shadowbox. He once said to me: ‘Someday you’ll own this liquor store and I’ll be heavyweight champion of the world.’ Both of those came true, too.”

So Clay travelled to Rome by aeroplane. But he came prepared. Before departing he visited an army surplus store and purchased a parachute, which he kept strapped on throughout the flight.

Accounts differ as to Clay’s behaviour once the flight was airborne. In David Remnick’s King of the World Joe Martin’s son, Joe Jr, claims that during a rough flight Clay prayed in the aisle with the parachute on his back. Others recall Clay distracting himself from his fears by holding forth on the flight and decreeing who among the boxing team would win a gold medal. Obviously he included himself in this select group.

But first there was Rome to deal with. There is a tendency to talk up the profound impact Clay had as he wandered the Olympic Village shaking as many hands as possible, like a politician on the campaign trail. There is a tendency to say everyone could see they were in the presence of greatness.

Clay’s credentials as an amateur boxer were there for all to see: 100 victories in 108 bouts, six Kentucky Golden Gloves championships, succes sive light-heavyweight National Amateur Athletic Union titles (1959 and 1960) and two Golden Gloves titles in a row (1959 and 1960). Before the Games, Sports Illustrated declared that he was the USA’s best hope for a medal in boxing, but there was no real sense that a worldwide star was about to be unleashed.

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In his book, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, David Maraniss writes: “In retrospect, because of the worldwide fame he gained later as Muhammad Ali, there is a temptation to present him as a larger than life figure at the Rome Olympics than he really was. He was ebullient and memorable from the start, but he was not the leader of the US delegation. It was Clay seeking out people, not people seeking out Clay.”

Clay stormed back with a torrent of combination punching which left Pietrzykowski dazed. He no longer relied too much on his left jab, but made equal use of his right to penetrate the southpaw’s guard. Ripping into the stamina-lacking Pole, he drew blood and came preciously close to scoring a knockout. At the final bell, Pietrzykowski was slumped helplessly against the ropes. There was no doubting the verdict. All the judges made Clay the points winner.”

the boy in the ring that autumn night could turn out to be something special, and wrote about his blossoming professional career as well as his triumph in Rome. Things appear larger in the rearview mirror.

The photograph which shows Clay receiving his medal can, in itself, be seen as a symbol of the changes that were about to take place not just in boxing, but in society as a whole. To Clay’s left stands the bloodied Pietrzykowski, to his right the bronze medallists Giulio Saraudi and Madigan.

They are wizened fighters of the old school. Between them, standing tall and gleaming, is Cassius Clay.

Clay made an impact on the people he met and earned the nickname “the mayor of the Olympic Village”. In his peerless biography of Muhammad Ali, Thomas Hauser recalls one unnamed teammate saying: “You would have thought he was running for mayor. He went around introducing himself and learning other people’s names and swapping team lapel pins. If they’d had an election, he would have won in a walk.”

Coverage of the victory suggests the media did not fully grasp the potential of the 18-year-old standing in front of them. The Guardian merely carried the result in the following day’s paper, while the New York Times carried a brief report of the final on 5 September 1960. The account read:

“Cassius was easily one of the most popular athletes in the Villaggio Olimpico last summer,” Daley wrote. “He was winning friends and influencing people everywhere. If he craves publicity, he also attracts it with the inexorability of a magnet drawing steel filings.”

was good to watch, but he seemed to make only glancing contact. It is true that the Pole finished the three-round bout helpless and out on his feet.”

Clay returned to the US with all the evidence he needed to turn professional dangling around his neck. Dick Schaap, then assistant sports editor at Newsweek, had met Clay along with other US fighters before the Games, impressing them by taking them to Sugar Ray Robinson’s restaurant in Harlem, and Schaap was there to meet Clay at Idlewild airport when he touched down from Rome.

As Schaap recalled in an article – “Muhammad Ali: then and now” – for Sport magazine, together they embarked on an endless night which took in Times Square, where Clay had a phony newspaper printed up which said “Clay signs up to fight Paterson”, they had cheesecake in Jack Dempsey’s restaurant and a drink in the jazz bar across the street, where he sampled his first ever drop of alcohol – literally a drop – which he asked them to put in his Coke.

All the while Clay seemed amazed that people knew who he was. Girls were interested while men just wanted to shake his hand. Of course it helped that he was wearing a sports jacket with USA emblazoned on the back and had a gold medal engraved with Pugilato around his neck.

As he advanced through the rounds, Clay also became a favourite with the local crowds thanks to a style which, at that stage, was seen as highly unorthodox and, by many of boxing’s old guard, as unnecessarily carefree.

Clay’s opening fight, against the Belgian Yvon Becaus, was stopped by the referee in the second round. He then beat the Russian Gennadiy Shatkov, who had won middleweight gold medal at the 1956 Games in Melbourne, in a unanimous points decision.

In the semi-final Clay faced Australia’s Tony Madigan. Again he triumphed in a unanimous decision but many observers felt Madigan was hard done by. A 2010 article in Louisville’s Courier-Journal to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his gold medal has Bud Palmer, a CBS presenter, saying he felt that Clay had been beaten by the Australian.

In the final Clay came up against Zbigniew ‘Ziggy’ Pietrzykowski, “a portly coffeehouse keeper” from Poland who was somewhere between 25 and 28, depending on whom you believe. The fight before the light-heavyweight final also pitched a Pole against one of the US team. Eddie Crook’s victory over Tadeusz Walasek drew furious howls of derision from the crowd packed into the Palazzo della Sport.

Daley’s piece, perhaps unknowingly, anticipated the radicalisation of Clay, who would renounce his slave name after he beat Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world in 1964.

“Cassius Clay, an 18-year-old Louisville light-heavyweight, gave the United States its third gold medal in boxing tonight when he soundly whipped Ziggy Pietrzykowski, an experienced Polish Olympian, in the 178-pound Olympic final.

Their angry cries reached the dressing room, where Clay was in the final stages of his preparation. “The people made me fight harder than I should have,” he told the Courier-Journal. “When they booed five minutes after Crook’s win and I was the next American in the ring, I knew I had to leave no doubts.”

“Clay battered the Pole mercilessly in the last round with a flurry of left and right combinations that had his rival groggy. He opened a cut over the Pole’s left eye and almost finished him. It was a unanimous 5-0 decision by the judges. This one went down well with the crowd of 16,000, which also cheered the Pole.

“The 25-year-old Pole, the bronze medal winner in 1956, who has had 231 fights, met his master. It took the American a little while to counteract his opponent’s southpaw style but by the third round he had it figured out. There were no knockdowns.”

“The proudest of all Olympic champions was Cassius Marcellus Clay, the great-great-grandson of a slave who borrowed the name from his owner, the Cassius Marcellus Clay who was ambassador to Russia and kin to Henry Clay. When the gold chain with the Olympic gold medal was draped around the boy’s neck in the Pallazzo della Sport, there it remained. “’I didn’t take that medal off for 48 hours,’ said Clay. ‘I even wore it to bed. I didn’t sleep too good because I had to sleep on my back so that the medal wouldn’t cut me. But I didn’t care, I was Olympic champion.’

“He flew back to New York and paraded in his Olympic blazer around Times Square, his Olympic medal still draped around him. Since folks had seen him on television and since he carried his own advertising signs, he was recognised wherever he went and he loved it.”

Their night ended in the suite in the Waldorf Towers (paid for by a Louisville businessman who hoped to manage Clay) where the Olympic champion spent an hour showing Schaap photographs he had taken in Rome. Eventually, as Schaap recalls, he had to go to bed. “’Cassius,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to explain to my wife tomorrow why I didn’t get home tonight.’ ‘You mean,’ said Cassius, ‘your wife knows who I is, too?’”

The perceived wisdom, largely drawn from Ali’s autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story (which he claimed not to have read) is that Clay later threw his gold medal into the Ohio river after a Louisville restaurant refused to serve him and a motorcycle gang threatened him.

In fact, this story was invented – he simply lost the medal. He admitted years later: “I don’t know where I put that thing.” Ali was issued with a replacement gold medal at half-time in the USA v Yugoslavia basketball game at the Atlanta Games in 1996.

Such was Clay’s popularity that the crowd’s mood seemed to change as soon as he came to the ring.

But a resolution to leave no doubt in the mind of the audience and judges was one thing, but putting it into practice against the more experienced and physically stronger Pole was another, as the British journalist John Cottrell recalled: “In the first round, it seemed that Clay would be badly mauled. He was confused by his opponent’s southpaw style, took some heavy punishment, and once showed his inexperience by closing his eyes in the face of a barrage of blows. Clay managed to keep out of trouble in the second round, and in the last minute he abandoned his show-off style with the fancy footwork and dropped hands, and stood his ground to throw four hard rights to the head.

Even so, he was still behind on points at this stage.

‘I knew,’ he explained afterwards, ‘that I had to take the third round big to win.’

The day after Clay won gold, in a piece headlined “The Gladiators”, the New York Times journalist Arthur Daley gives but a passing mention to Clay’s achievement as the article focuses on the gold medal won by Clay’s room-mate in Rome, the light-middleweight Willie ‘Skeeter’ McClure, and other members of the US boxing team, as well as the atmosphere in the arena in Rome.

The mention of Clay reads: “Then Cassius Marcellus Clay of Louisville followed the script of another Cassius and bloodied his Caesar, even though this Caesar bore the rather unappropriate [sic] name of Zbigniew Pietrzykowski. No Roman was he, but a Polish light-heavyweight.”

“Clay did finish big. In that final round he suddenly found his top form, moving in and out with expert judgment, punching crisply and with perfect timing. This sharper, better co-ordinated

Others, in the immediate aftermath of the Olympics, focused on Clay’s style, which was not to the liking of traditionalists. In his biography, Hauser lists the “dean of boxing writers”, AJ Liebling, as saying: “I watched Clay’s performance in Rome, and considered it attractive but not probative. Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble over water. He

But by the following May, Daley had realised that

Ali had already made an impact in Atlanta. Shaking, trembling but still majestic, he took the Olympic torch from the swimmer Janet Evans and lit the flame at the opening ceremony. It is as enduring a memory from that Games as any achieved by an athlete.

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OCTOBER 01

CAMEROON DECLARED INDEPENDENCE FROM UNITED KINGDOM. Southern Cameroons became part of Cameroon on 1 October 1961. Foncha served as Prime Minister of West Cameroun and Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Cameroun. However, the English-speaking peoples of the Southern Cameroons (now West Cameroun) did not believe that they were fairly treated by the French-speaking government of the country. Following a referendum on 20 May 1972, a new constitution was adopted in Cameroun which replaced the federal state with a unitary state. Southern Cameroons lost its autonomous status and became the Northwest Province and Southwest Province of the Republic of Cameroun. The Southern Cameroonians felt further marginalised. Groups such as the Cameroon Anglophone Movement (CAM) demanded greater autonomy, or independence, for the provinces.

Pro-independence groups claim that UN Resolution 1608 21 April 1961, which required the UK, the Government of the Southern Cameroons and Republic of Cameroun to engage in talks with a view to agreeing measures for union of the two countries, was not implemented, and that the Government of the United Kingdom was negligent in terminating its trusteeship without ensuring that proper arrangements were made. They say that the adoption of a federal constitution by Cameroun on 1 September 1961 constituted annexation of South Cameroons.

Representatives of Anglophone groups convened the first All Anglophone Conference (AAC1) in Buea from 2 April to 3 April 1993. The conference issued the “Buea Declaration”, which called for constitutional amendments to restore the 1961 federation. This was followed by the second All Anglophone Conference (AAC2) in Bamenda in 1994. This conference issued the “Bamenda Declaration”, which stated that if the federal state was not restored within a reasonable time, Southern Cameroons would declare its independence.

The AAC was renamed the Southern Cameroons Peoples Conference (SCPC), and later the Southern Cameroons Peoples Organisation (SCAPO), with the Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC) as the executive governing body. Younger activists formed the Southern Cameroons Youth League (SCYL) in Buea on 28 May 1995. The SCNC sent a delegation, led by John Foncha, to the United Nations, which was received on 1 June 1995 and presented a petition against the ‘annexation’ of the Southern Cameroons by French Cameroun.

This was followed by a signature referendum the same year, which the organisers claim produced a 99% vote in favour of independence with 315,000 people voting.

OCTOBER 03

JÂNIO QUADROS IS ELECTED THE PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL FOR A FIVE-YEAR TERM. On Apr. 21, 1960, Brasilia became the nation’s official capital and was a sign of a commitment to more development of Brazil’s interior. Kubitschek was not allowed to succeed himself and, in 1960, Jânio Quadros was elected president by the greatest popular margin in Brazil’s history.

Quadros believed that if the United States could trade with the Soviet Union, so could Brazil. He began negotiations with Communist bloc nations.

This displeased the United States. Wealthy Brazilian businessmen were unhappy with Quadros’ tax plan. Profits from newly created industries or from industries of special benefit to the public would be taxed at 10 percent.

Other companies would be taxed at 30 percent, or taxed 50 percent on profits from money invested abroad. Quadros angered conservatives also by greeting Cuba’s Minister of Industry, Che Guevara, and giving him a medal while Guevara was passing through Brazil on his way home to Cuba.

After only eight months as president, the military forced Quadros from office. Later, Quadros was to blame various foreigners for their participation in opposition against his presidency, including the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, John Moors Cabot and the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon.

Following Quadros as president was Brazil’s vice-president, João Goulart -- a millionaire landowner. Goulart advocated mild land reform and mild restrictions on the amount of profit that could be taken out of the country. He extended the vote to illiterates, and he extended to Brazilian communists the right to participate in the political life of their nation.

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara, complained of Brazil’s neutrality in the Cold War. American officials complained about some members in Goulart’s cabinet, and Attorney-General Robert Kennedy met with Goulart and spoke of his uneasiness about Goulart allowing Communists to hold positions in government agencies. The United States was pursuing what it called the Alliance for Progress, which was supposed to support reform as well as economic advance, but the U.S. was holding back on loans to Brazil.

OCTOBER 05

WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS VOTE TO MAKE THE COUNTRY A REPUBLIC.

It was a narrow victory for the republicans. However, a considerable number of Afrikaners did vote against the measure. The few Blacks, Indians and Coloureds allowed to vote were decidedly against the measure.

English speakers who voted for a Republic had done so on condition that their cultural heritage be safeguarded. Many had associated a Republic with the survival of the white South African.

MacMillan’s speech had illustrated that the British government was no longer prepared to stand by South Africa’s racialist policies. Nevertheless, the referendum was a significant victory for Afrikaner nationalism as British political and cultural influence waned in South Africa.

However, one question remained after the referendum: would South Africa become a Republic outside the Commonwealth (the outcome favoured by the most Afrikaner nationalists)? Withdrawal from the Commonwealth would likely alienate English speakers and damage relations with many other countries. Former British colonies such as India, Ceylon, Pakistan and Ghana were all republics within the Commonwealth, and Verwoerd announced that his would follow suit “if possible”.

By the end of his term (and, as a result of his assassination, his life), Verwoerd had solidified the NP’s domination of South African politics. In the 1966 elections, the party won 126 out of the 170 seats in parliament.

By 1960, however, much of the South African electorate were calling for withdrawal from the Commonwealth and the establishment of South Africa as a republic. It was decided that a Republican referendum was to be held in October.

International circumstances made the referendum a growing necessity. In the aftermath of the World War II, former British colonies in Africa and Asia were gaining independence and publicising the ills of apartheid. Commonwealth members were determined to isolate South Africa.

On 5 October 1960, 90.5 per cent of the white electorate turned out to vote on the issue.

850,458 (52 per cent) voted in favour of a Republic, while 775,878 were against it. The Cape, Orange Free State and Transvaal were all in favour; Natal, a mainly English-speaking province, was not.

Under Wachuku’s leadership at the United Nations, both the Nigerian Army and the Nigerian Police Force made their debut in International Peacekeeping - under the auspices of the World Organization. During his time at the United Nations, Nigeria’s Major-General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi Ironsi was appointed Commander of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in the Congo. Also, the first Nigerian Permanent Secretary, Mr. Francis Nwokedi was retained by the United Nations to help in the reorganization of the Civil Service in the Congo. Wachuku also secured the appointment of the first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations - Nigeria’s Godfrey K. J. Amachree - who became UN Under Secretary-General for Trusteeship and Non-Self-Governing Territories.

In January 1961, Verwoerd’s government brought forth legislation to transform the Union of South Africa into the Republic of South Africa. The constitution was finalised in April. It merged the authority of the British Crown and Governor-General into a new post, State President. The president would have rather little political power, serving more as the ceremonial head of the country. The political power was to lie with the Prime Minister and head of government. The South African Republic would also have its own monetary system, employing Rands and cents.

OCTOBER 07

The question of apartheid dominated the 1958 election and the NP took 55 per cent of the vote, thus winning a clear majority for the first time.

When Strijdom died that same year, there was a tripartite succession contest between Swart, Donges and Hendrik Verwoerd. The latter, devoted to the cause of a South African Republic, was the new Prime Minister. Verwoerd, a former Minister of Native Affairs, played a leading role in the institution of the apartheid system. Under his leadership, the NP solidified its control over South African, apartheid-era politics.

To gain support of the English-identified population of South Africa, Verwoerd appointed several English-speakers to his cabinet. He also cited the radical political movements elsewhere in the African continent as vindication of his belief that black and white nationalism could not work within the same system. Verwoerd also presented the NP as the party best equipped to deal with the widely-perceived threat of communism.

At the United Nations, he soon stood out in excellence and visionary, selfless service to his country Nigeria and the rest of humankind. It was during this period that Time and Jet magazine commendably quoted Wachuku as saying - from the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly: “I am losing confidence in the great powers. They are climbing from the pedestal of greatness to the pedestal of insanity. We expect leadership from them; they give us destruction. We expect wisdom from them; they give us lack of knowledge....” He was lambasting the Eastern and Western Blocs for not ending their differences and quarrels.

OCTOBER 12

NIGERIA BECOMES THE 99TH MEMBER OF THE UNITED NATIONS.

OTOYA YAMAGUCHI ASSASSINATES INEJIRO ASANUMA, THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JAPANESE SOCIALIST PARTY. In the 1930s, Asanuma became a national socialist, lending his support to the war policies of the Imperial Japanese Army, and served in the Diet from 1936. However, he withdrew his candidacy from the 1942 election and retired from politics until after the war.

He was widely criticized for a 1959 incident where he went to Communist-controlled Mainland China and called the United States “the shared enemy of China and Japan”. When he returned from this trip he wore a Mao suit while disembarking from his plane in Japan, sparking criticism even from Socialist leaders. At that time, both the United States and Japan recognized the Republic of China as the rightful government of Mainland China.

Notably, Time magazine described him as “Nigeria’s dynamic U.N. Ambassador Jaja Wachuku” - stating that because of his worthy, very lively and enthusiastic diplomatic style with a lot of energy, wisdom and determination; “Nigeria, less than two months after winning its independence, is on its way to becoming one of the major forces in Africa.”

On October 12, 1960, Asanuma was assassinated by 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi, a militant nationalist, during a televised political debate for the coming elections for the House of Representatives. While Asanuma spoke from the lectern at Tokyo’s Hibiya Hall, Yamaguchi rushed onstage and ran his wakizashi through Asanuma’s abdomen, killing him. The entire incident was broadcast live on television, witnessed by millions of viewers, and preserved on film.

From 1960 to 1961, Wachuku served as first Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations in New York, as well as Federal Minister for Economic Development. He hoisted Nigeria’s flag as the 99th member of the United Nations on 7 October 1960. Accordingly, Jaja Wachuku was instrumental to Nigeria becoming the 58th Member State of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on Monday 14 November 1960. Also, as First Ambassador of Nigeria to the United Nations, Wachuku represented the country at the independence celebrations of Tanganyika - now known as United Republic of Tanzania. At the United Nations, Jaja Wachuku was elected First African Chairman of a United Nations Conciliation Commission - the Conciliation Commission to the Congo.

The Japanese public was deeply shocked by the Asanuma assassination. In its wake, a spate of mass demonstrations for peace and order ensued across the country. The assassin Yamaguchi was captured at the scene of the crime, and a few weeks thereafter committed suicide while in police custody.[4] After Asanuma’s death, the Japan Socialist Party further divided between politicians on the left and right, ultimately disbanding and reconstituting itself as the Social Democratic Party in 1996.

Following a cabinet reshuffle at Nigeria’s independence, Wachuku was appointed Minister of Economic Development and Member of the First Nigerian Delegation on the admission of Nigeria to the United Nations. On the eve of his departure from New York, the Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa invited Wachuku to his hotel suite and told him that he was leaving him behind as Leader of the Delegation and Ambassador plus Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations. Jaja Wachuku protested to Prime Minister Balewa - saying that he did not join the Delegation with the intention of staying in New York, and that he told his wife, Rhoda, that he would be away for only one week. Prime Minister Balewa replied: “Never mind, I will tell her when I arrive Lagos.”

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However, this postcard never made it out of the country. The University of Ibadan College Students Union demanded deportation and accused the volunteers of being “America’s international spies” and the project as “a scheme designed to foster neocolonialism.” Soon the international press picked up the story, leading several people in the U.S. administration to question the program.

Nigerian students protested the program, while the American volunteers sequestered themselves and eventually began a hunger strike.[19] After several days, the Nigerian students agreed to open a dialogue with the Americans.

OCTOBER 29

IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, CASSIUS CLAY WINS HIS FIRST PROFESSIONAL BOXING MATCH.

OCTOBER 05

Bobby Richardson and pinch-hitter Dale Long both greeted him with singles, and Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh was forced to bench the veteran pitcher in favor of Harvey Haddix. Although he got Roger Maris to foul out, Haddix gave up a key single to Mickey Mantle that scored Richardson and moved Long to third. Yogi Berra followed, hitting a short grounder to first, with Rocky Nelson easily getting the second out.

THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES WON THE 1960 WORLD SERIES OF BASEBALL IN GAME 7, ON A HOME RUN HIT BY BILL MAZEROSKI FOR A 10–9 VICTORY OVER THE NEW YORK YANKEES.

In what, at the moment, stood as a monumental play, Mantle, seeing he had no chance to beat a play at second, scurried back to first and avoided Nelson’s tag (which would have been the third out) as Gil McDougald (pinch-running for Long) raced home to tie the score, 9–9. Had Mantle been out on the play, the run would still have counted if it had scored before the tag. With Mantle safe, the top of the ninth continued, but ended when the next batter hit into a force play.

For the deciding seventh game, Bob Turley, the winning pitcher in Game 2, got the nod for the Yankees against the Pirates’ Vern Law, the winning pitcher in Games 1 and 4.

Ralph Terry returned to the mound in the bottom of the ninth. The first batter to face him was Bill Mazeroski. With a count of one ball and no strikes, the Pirates’ second baseman smashed a historic long drive over the left field wall, ending the contest and crowning the Pirates as World Series champions. As the Pirates erupted, the Yankees stood across the field in stunned disbelief. The improbable champions were outscored, outhit, and outplayed, but had managed to pull out a victory anyhow. Years later, Mickey Mantle was quoted[citation needed] as saying that losing the 1960 series was the biggest disappointment of his career, the only loss, amateur or professional, he cried actual tears over. For Bill Mazeroski, by contrast, it was the highlight.

Turley lasted only one inning. After dismissing the first two batters, Turley walked Bob Skinner, then Rocky Nelson homered to give the Pirates a 2–0 lead. Turley was then pulled after giving up a single to Smoky Burgess leading off the second.

Don Hoak then drew a base on balls against Bill Stafford, and Bill Mazeroski’s bunt single loaded the bases. Stafford appeared to get the Yankees out of trouble after inducing Law to hit into a double play, pitcher to catcher to first. But Bill Virdon’s single to right scored both Hoak and Mazeroski and increased the Pirates’ lead to 4–0.

The Yankees got on the scoreboard in the fifth on Bill Skowron’s leadoff home run, his second homer of the Series. In the sixth, Bobby Richardson led off with a single and Tony Kubek drew a base on balls.

Elroy Face relieved Law and got Roger Maris to pop out to Hoak in foul territory, but Mickey Mantle singled to score Richardson. Yogi Berra followed with a home run that gave the Yankees their first lead, 5–4.

Mazeroski became the first player to hit a game-ending home run in the seventh game, to win a World Series. Thirty-three years later, Joe Carter would become the only other player to end the World Series with a home run, doing so for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1993 World Series against the Pirates’ in-state rivals, the Philadelphia Phillies, albeit in Game 6. Although most noted for the series-ending homer, Game 7 is also the only game in all of postseason history with no strikeouts recorded by either side.

The Yankees scored two more runs in the eighth.

With two out, Berra walked and Skowron singled.

Johnny Blanchard then singled to score Berra, then Clete Boyer doubled to score Skowron.

The Pirates opened the bottom of the eighth inning with singles by Gino Cimoli (pinch-hitting for Face) and Virdon (on a ground ball to short for what could have been a double play; the ball instead took a bad hop and struck Kubek in the throat). Dick Groat then chased Bobby Shantz (who had entered the game in the third and had pitched five innings, after not pitching more than four during the regular season) with a single to score Cimoli. Jim Coates got Skinner out on a sacrifice bunt, which moved the runners up. Nelson followed with a fly ball to right, and Virdon declined to challenge Maris’ throwing arm. Coates then got two quick strikes on Roberto Clemente and was one strike away from getting the Yankees out of their most serious trouble of the afternoon.

Bobby Richardson of the Yankees was named MVP of the Series, the only time that someone from the defeated team has been so honored.

OCTOBER 14

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JOHN F. KENNEDY FIRST SUGGESTS THE IDEA FOR THE PEACE CORPS OF THE UNITED STATES. John F. Kennedy first announced his idea for such an organization during the 1960 presidential campaign, at a late-night speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on October 14, 1960. On November 1, on the steps of the Michigan Union, he dubbed the proposed organization the “Peace Corps.” A golden plaque in the ground commemorates the momentous event.

Clemente eventually hit a Baltimore Chop towards first with first baseman Skowron and Coates trying to get to the ball at the same time at the cut of the infield grass. Clemente’s speed forced Skowron to just hold onto the ball as Coates, after trying to get the ground ball, could not make it to first base in time to cover. The high chopper allowed Virdon to score, cutting the Yankee lead to 7–6. Hal Smith followed with a three-run home run to give the Pirates a 9–7 lead. Ralph Terry relieved Coates and got the last out.

Critics opposed the program. Kennedy’s opponent, Richard M. Nixon, predicted it would become a “cult of escapism” and “a haven for draft dodgers.”

Bob Friend, an 18-game winner for the Pirates and their starter in Games 2 and 6, came on in the ninth to try to protect the lead.

Others doubted whether recent graduates had the necessary skills and maturity.

The idea was popular among students, however, and Kennedy pursued it, asking respected academics such as Max Millikan and Chester Bowles to help him outline the organization and its goals. During his inaugural address, Kennedy again promised to create the program: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country”.

President Kennedy in a speech at the White House on June 22, 1962, “Remarks to Student Volunteers Participating in Operation Crossroads Africa”, acknowledged that Operation Crossroads for Africa was the basis for the development of the Peace Corps. “This group and this effort really were the progenitors of the Peace Corps and what this organization has been doing for a number of years led to the establishment of what I consider to be the most encouraging indication of the desire for service not only in this country but all around the world that we have seen in recent years”.

The Peace Corps website answered the question “Who Inspired the Creation of the Peace Corps?”, acknowledging that the Peace Corps were based on Operation Crossroads Africa founded by Rev. James H. Robinson.

On March 1, 1961, Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924 that officially started the Peace Corps. Concerned with the growing tide of revolutionary sentiment in the Third World, Kennedy saw the Peace Corps as a means of countering the stereotype of the “Ugly American” and “Yankee imperialism,” especially in the emerging nations of post-colonial Africa and Asia. Kennedy appointed his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to be the program’s first director. Shriver fleshed out the organization with the help of Warren Wiggins and others. Shriver and his think tank outlined the organization’s goals and set the initial number of volunteers. The program began recruiting in July 1962.

Until about 1967, applicants had to pass a placement test that tested “general aptitude” (knowledge of various skills needed for Peace Corps assignments) and language aptitude.[citation needed] After an address from Kennedy, who was introduced by Rev. Russell Fuller of Memorial Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, on August 28, 1961, the first group of volunteers left for Ghana and Tanzania. The program was formally authorized by Congress on September 22, 1961, and within two years over 7,300 volunteers were serving in 44 countries. This number increased to 15,000 in June 1966, the largest number in the organization’s history.

As Muhammad Ali started fighting in professional boxing bouts, he realized that there things he could do to create attention for himself. For instance, before fights, Ali would say things to worry his opponents. He would also frequently declare, “I am the greatest of all time!” Often before a fight, Ali would write poetry that would either called the round his opponent would fall or boast of his own abilities. Muhammad Ali’s most famous line was when he stated he was going to “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

His theatrics worked. Many people paid to see Muhammad Ali’s fights just to see such a braggart lose. In 1964, even the heavyweight champion, Charles “Sonny” Liston got caught up in the hype and agreed to fight Muhammad Ali. On February 25, 1964, Muhammad Ali fought Liston for the heavyweight title in Miami, Florida.

Liston tried for a quick knockout, but Ali was too fast to catch. By the 7th round, Liston was too exhausted, had hurt his shoulder, and was worried about a cut under his eye. Liston refused to continue the fight. Muhammad Ali had become the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

The day after the championship bout with Liston, Muhammad Ali publicly announced his conversion to Islam. The public was not happy. Ali had joined the Nation of Islam, a group led by Elijah Muhammad that advocated for a separate black nation.

Since many people found the Nation of Islam’s beliefs to be racist, they were angry and disappointed that Ali had joined them.

Up to this point, Muhammad Ali was still known as Cassius Clay. When he joined the Nation of Islam in 1964, he shed his “slave name” (he had been named after a white abolitionist that had freed his slaves) and took on the new name of Muhammad Ali.

The organization experienced controversy in its first year of operation. On October 13, 1961, a postcard from a volunteer named Margery Jane Michelmore in Nigeria to a friend in the U.S. described her situation in Nigeria as “squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions.”

20 October

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The vast, low-lying central area is a basin-shaped plateau sloping toward the west and covered by tropical rainforest. This area is surrounded by mountainous terraces in the west, plateaus merging into savannas in the south and southwest, and dense grasslands extending beyond the Congo River in the north. High mountains are found in the extreme eastern region.

NOVEMBER 02

PENGUIN BOOKS IS FOUND NOT GUILTY OF OBSCENITY IN THE CASE OF D. H. LAWRENCE’S NOVEL LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER.

The D.R.C. lies on the Equator, with one-third of the country to the north and two-thirds to the south. The climate is hot and humid in the river basin and cool and dry in the southern highlands.

South of the Equator, the rainy season lasts from October to May and north of the Equator, from April to November. Along the Equator, rainfall is fairly regular throughout the year. During the wet season, thunderstorms often are violent but seldom last more than a few hours. The average annual rainfall for the entire country is about 107 centimeters (42 in.).

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy, with assistance from Pino Orioli; an unexpurgated edition could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. (A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen’s Mandrake Press in 1929.) The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words.

The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence’s own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with “Tiger”, a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three versions.

When the full unexpurgated edition was published

by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word “fuck” and its derivatives. Another objection involves the use of the word “cunt”.

Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was “not guilty”. This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read”.

The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher’s dedication, which reads: “For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ and thus made D. H. Lawrence’s last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom.”.

NOVEMBER 13

SAMMY DAVIS, JR., MARRIES THE SWEDISH ACTRESS MAY BRITT. Thanks to his parents, Sammy Davis Jr’s route to fame began in Vaudeville, before moving on to the dizzy heights of Broadway and Las Vegas.

An all-round performer, he could sing, act, dance and make people laugh with his many impersonations. Davis’s long career in show business was even more remarkable because he managed to overcome racial barriers, in an era of strict segregation and racism.

Davis was drafted into the US Army when was eighteen and his experiences were not happy ones.

Suffering abuse by fellow soldiers, he was transferred to an entertainment regiment, and eventually found himself performing in front of some of the same soldiers who had painted the word “coon” on his forehead.

After the war, Davis went solo and signed a recording contract with Decca Records. His first two albums - ‘Starring Sammy Davis, Jr’ and ‘Just for Lovers’ – both sold well and he soon became a headliner in Las Vegas and New York.

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NOVEMBER 14

A COLLISION BETWEEN TWO TRAINS IN PARDUBICE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, KILLS 117 PEOPLE. Stéblová - A tiny municipality of 80 houses and 190 people, located in Eastern Bohemia, the Czech Republic, and passed through by a train line connecting two regional cities - Hradec Králové and Pardubice. Stéblová may seem uninteresting at first, but 50 years ago, on 14 November 1960, it entered the Czechoslovak and European history with a tragic train crash.

On that day, at PM 5:43 of the local time, two trains - one heading to Pardubice, the second to Hradec Králové - crashed head-on at approximately 60 kmph speed near the Stéblová railway station.

In the 1960s Davis managed to turn an average Broadway show, ‘Mr Wonderful’, into a roaring success. He went on to woo critics in the film ‘Porgy and Bess’ and, as a member of the high-profile ‘Rat Pack’, he hobnobbed with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, and Joey Bishop.

The highlife also served up pitfalls for Davis, and his marriage to Swedish actress May Britt earned him the vitriol of the Ku Klux Klan. While his ‘Rat Pack’ ways of drink and drugs threatened his health, his lavish lifestyle nearly bankrupted him.

In the mid-1950s, Sammy was involved with Kim Novak, who was a valuable star under contract to Columbia Studios.

The head of the studio, Harry Cohn called one of the mob bosses, who was asked to tell Sammy that he had to stop the affair.

In 1960, Davis caused controversy when he married white Swedish-born actress May Britt. Davis received hate mail when he was starred in the Broadway musical adaptation of Golden Boy from 1964 - 1966 (for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor), but that did not bother his fans. At the time Davis appeared in the play, interracial marriages were forbidden by law in many US states. The couple had one daughter and adopted two sons.

Davis performed almost continuously and spent little time with his wife. They divorced in 1968, after Davis admitted to having had an affair with singer Lola Falana. That year, Davis started dating Altovise Gore, a dancer in “Golden Boy”. They were wed in 1970 by Jesse Jackson. They adopted a child, and remained married until Davis’ death in 1990.

Davis became addicted to drugs and alcohol, later developing both liver and kidney trouble which required hospitalisation in 1974.

The last fifteen years of Davis’s life were conducted at the performer’s usual hectic pace. In 1978 he appeared in another Broadway musical, ‘Stop the World - I Want To Get Off’ Following the discovery of a throat tumour in 1989, Davis underwent radiation therapy, but died in 1990.

NOVEMBER 14

BELGIUM THREATENS TO LEAVE THE UNITED NATIONS OVER CRITICISM OF ITS POLICY CONCERNING THE REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO.

In total, 118 people died. Tens of others suffered very grave injuries.

Established as a Belgian colony in 1908, the Republic of the Congo gained its independence in 1960, but its early years were marred by political and social instability.

In the Czech Republic, it is the gravest accident on record. And in Europe, there has been only one rail accident that killed more people - in 1974 in Zagreb, former Yugoslavia (now Croatia), with 153 dead.

Col. Joseph Mobuto seized power and declared himself president in a November 1965 coup. He subsequently changed his name - to Mobuto Sese Seko - as well as that of the country - to Zaire.

Mobuto retained his position for 32 years through several sham elections, as well as through the use of brutal force.

First, the Stéblová train disaster took place during the Czechoslovak communist regime, which effectively meant that the authorities tried to keep the event as secret as possible, officially to prevent it from being abused by “enemies of socialism”.

Ethnic strife and civil war, touched off by a massive inflow of refugees in 1994 from fighting in Rwanda and Burundi, led in May 1997 to the toppling of the Mobuto regime by a rebellion backed by Rwanda and Uganda and fronted by Laurent Kabila. He renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), but in August 1998 his regime was itself challenged by a second insurrection again backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Troops from Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe intervened to support Kabila’s regime.

All Czechoslovak media were ordered by the Central Committee of the communist party to report about the crash only very shortly. The trial was not public, compensations were distributed in silence, and everything was supposed to be forgotten quickly.

A cease-fire was signed in July 1999 by the DRC, Congolese armed rebel groups, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe but sporadic fighting continued. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and his son, Joseph Kabila, was named head of state.

In October 2002, the new president was successful in negotiating the withdrawal of Rwandan forces occupying eastern Congo; two months later, the Pretoria Accord was signed by all remaining warring parties to end the fighting and establish a government of national unity.

The second remarkable aspect is that in spite of rather robust investigation, there is (and most probably always will be) very little that can explain why the steam train heading to Pardubice left the Stéblová railway station ahead of schedule, which in effect caused the head-on collision with the diesel train heading to Hradec Králové.

A transitional government was set up in July 2003. Joseph Kabila as president and four vice presidents represented the former government, former rebel groups, the political opposition, and civil society. The transitional government held a successful constitutional referendum in December 2005 and elections for the presidency, National Assembly, and provincial legislatures in 2006.

Importantly, the crash took place amid very difficult conditions - it was about 3 degrees Celsius, the evening was dark and misty, and the Stéblová station was very poorly lit.

The steam train staff - and two people in the station too - saw a shady green light, understood as a departure sign. But the train dispatcher at the station never gave any signal - he could not, because he was inside the railway station building at the time.

The National Assembly was installed in September 2006 and Kabila was inaugurated president in December 2006. Provincial assemblies were constituted in early 2007, and elected governors and national senators in January 2007. The most recent national elections were held on 28 November 2011.

It has never been explained what the mysterious green light was, or where it came from - whether it was an optical illusion, a reflection, or whether there were any light in the first place.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.) includes the greater part of the Congo River basin, which covers an area of almost one million square kilometers (400,000 sq. mi.). The country’s only outlet to the Atlantic Ocean is a narrow strip of land on the north bank of the Congo River.

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NOVEMBER 15

One of the most mind-boggling statistics is that Chamberlain averaged 48.5 minutes on court that season, despite the fact that games are only usually 48 minutes long. Because Chamberlain had played overtime in games, this meant that his average exceeded the normal 48 minutes. He had played 3,882 minutes out of a possible 3,890 that season.

Ongoing problems with the W-47 warhead, especially with its mechanical arming and safing equipment, led to large numbers of the missiles being recalled for modifications, and the U.S. Navy sought a replacement with either a larger yield or equivalent destructive power. The result was the W-58 warhead used in a “cluster” of three warheads for the Polaris A-3, the final model of the Polaris missile.

Chamberlain’s play-off dream was again to be ended by Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics, who beat the Warriors after a close Game 7 loss.

NOVEMBER 24

There’s great irony that Wilt set the record for rebounds in a game vs the Celtics.

NOVEMBER 28

Chamberlain finally made his NBA debut on October 24, 1959, for the Philadelphia Warriors.

The Polaris missile was a two-stage solid-fuel nuclear-armed submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) built during the Cold War by Lockheed Corporation of California for the United States Navy.

Wilt Chamberlain holds the NBA record for most rebounds in a game with 55. Wilt set the record for most rebounds while playing for the Philadelphia Warriors in a game vs the Boston Celtics on November 24, 1960.

Wilt’s great rival, Bill Russell was the Celtics center. Russell himself had just set the record for most rebounds in a game eight months earlier in 1960, when he grabbed 51 rebounds vs the Syracuse Nationals. And even though Wilt set the record for most rebounds in a game with 55, the Celtics beat the Warriors in that game, 132-129.

THE PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL PLAYER WILT CHAMBERLAIN OF THE PHILADELPHIA 76ERS GETS 55 REBOUNDS IN AN NBA GAME VERSUS THE BOSTON CELTICS.

Many new project management techniques were introduced during the development of the Polaris missile program, to deal with the inherent system complexity. This includes the use of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). This technique replaced the simpler Gantt chart methodology which was largely employed prior to this program.

A POLARIS MISSILE IS TEST-LAUNCHED FROM CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA.

The Polaris program started development in 1956.

The USS George Washington, the first US missile submarine, successfully launched the first Polaris missile from a submerged submarine on July 20, 1960. The A-2 version of the Polaris missile was essentially an upgraded A-1, and it entered service in late 1961. It was fitted on a total of 13 submarines and served until June 1974.(1).

MAURITANIA BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF FRANCE.

His pick was highly unusual as it was meant to be a territorial pick, based on where a player had gone to college. As Chamberlain had gone to college in Kansas, and there were no local NBA teams in Kansas, the Warriors said that they had the right to draft Chamberlain based on the fact that he grew up in Philadelphia.

It was designed to be used as part of the Navy’s contribution to the United States arsenal of nuclear weapons, replacing the Regulus cruise missile.

Known as a Fleet Ballistic Missile (FBM), the Polaris was first launched from the Cape Canaveral, Florida, missile test base on January 7, 1960.

The Polaris missile replaced an earlier plan to create a submarine-based missile force based on a huge surfaced submarine carrying four “Jupiter” missiles, which would be carried and launched horizontally. This Navy “Jupiter” missile is not to be confused with the U.S. Army Jupiter Intermediate-range ballistic missile. At Edward Teller’s prompting,[1] the Navy’s “Jupiter” missile plans were abandoned in favor of the much smaller, solid-fuel-propelled Polaris.

Following the Polaris Sales Agreement in 1963, Polaris missiles were also carried on British Royal Navy submarines between 1968 and the mid1990s.

Plans to equip the Italian Navy with the missile ended in the mid-60s, after several successful test launches carried out on board the Italian cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi. Despite the successful launching tests, the US never provided the missiles, due to political convenience. Instead the Italian Government set to develop an indigenous missile, called Alfa, with a successful program, officially halted by Italian Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ratification and failure of the NATO Multilateral Force.

Originally, the Navy favored cruise missile systems in a strategic role, such as the Regulus missile deployed on the earlier USS Grayback and a few other submarines, but a major drawback of these early cruise missile launch systems (and the Jupiter proposals) was the need to surface, and remain surfaced for some time, to launch. Submarines were very vulnerable to attack during launch, and a fully or partially fueled missile on deck was a serious hazard. Rough weather was another major drawback for these designs, but rough sea conditions did not unduly affect Polaris launches.

The Polaris missile was gradually replaced on 31 of the 41 original SSBNs in the US Navy by the MIRV-capable Poseidon missile beginning in 1972.

During the 1980s, these missiles were replaced on twelve of these submarines by the Trident I missile. The ten George Washington- and Ethan Allen-class SSBNs retained Polaris A-3 until 1980 because their missile tubes were not large enough to accommodate Poseidon. With the USS Ohio (SSBN-726) commencing sea trials in 1980, these submarines were disarmed and redesignated as attack submarines to avoid exceeding the SALT II strategic arms treaty limits.

He had an incredible rookie season, averaging 37.6 points and 27 rebounds per game and he was the NBA Most Valuable Player. He was also the NBA Rookie of the Year. It was not, however, a completely successful rookie season for Chamberlain.

The Warriors faced Bolton Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and lost the series 4-2. This sparked off the great rivalry between Wilt Chamberlain and Celtics centre Bill Russell.

Wilt Chamberlain then shocked his fans by announcing he was thinking of making an extremely early retirement because he was tired of being double and triple-teamed and being a target for fouls.

He did not in fact retire and went on to exceed his averages of the season before. In his second season he averaged 38.4 points and 27.2 rebounds per game; he also scored over 3,000 points and broke the 2,000 rebound barrier, a feat which has never been beaten since. However, the team could not replicate the success of their star player and were beaten in the play-offs by the Syracuse Nationals, now known as the Philadelphia 76ers.

It quickly became apparent solid-fueled ballistic missiles had advantages over cruise missiles in range and accuracy, and unlike both Jupiter and cruise, were able to be launched from a submerged submarine, improving submarine survivability.

In his third season Chamberlain broke even more records. He became the first and only player to score 4,000 points in a season and only one player has ever come close to that: Michael Jordan who broke the 3,000 point barrier.

The prime contractor for all three versions of Polaris was Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, now Lockheed Martin.

He averaged 50.4 points per game, even scoring 100 points in one game and averaged 25.7 rebounds, which led to him accumulating 2052 for the season, again getting over 2,000 rebounds.

Throughout the 1960s, Mauritania’s main foreign policy objective was preserving its independence in the face of Moroccan irredentism. (Morocco finally recognized Mauritanian independence in 1969.) To that end, the Daddah government insisted on maintaining close ties with France, an effort that included allowing France to station troops on Mauritanian soil. In Africa, Mauritania established ties with the more conservative francophone countries because all the Arab League states (except Tunisia) and the African members of the Casablanca Group (Ghana, Guinea, and Mali) supported Morocco’s irredentist claims.

Mauritania applied for admission to the UN in 1960, sponsored by France, but its membership was vetoed by the Soviet Union, which supported the Arab League. For the most part, black Africa and the West favored Mauritania’s admission, and the Soviet Union dropped its opposition in 1961 in exchange for a favorable vote on Mongolia’s admission. In a final effort to block Mauritania’s admission, Morocco brought the issue to the General Assembly, which supported Mauritania’s application by a vote of sixty-eight to thirteen, with twenty abstentions. Mauritania was admitted to the UN on October 27, 1961. Mali, Guinea, and most Arab states supported Morocco in the debate.

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1960 / SEPTEMBER 05 / Design: Gintaras Elmonas