2 avril

Three Spanish captains rose against their Portuguese commander in the Patagonian winter harbour. Magellan put it down in a night: one captain was killed, one executed, and one marooned with a priest when the fleet sailed on.

The railroad hub that fed Richmond. When the first assaults failed, both armies dug in, and Grant extended the trenches west until Lee’s line was stretched too thin to hold, a foretaste of the Western Front.

The word’s earliest known use was about baseball: the Los Angeles Times quoted the pitcher Ben Henderson on his new “jazz ball”, which wobbled so that batters could do nothing with it. By 1915 it named a music in Chicago, often spelled “jass”, and the new bands from New Orleans took it up.

The second-largest subprime lender in America had made about 60 billion dollars of loans in 2006. When its Wall Street lenders stopped funding it, it laid off 3,200 people, more than half its staff, and filed.

The leaders of the twenty largest economies pledged 1.1 trillion dollars, most of it through the IMF, whose lending resources they tripled. Gordon Brown’s summit in the Docklands was the high point of the coordinated response.