22 octobre

Lady K’abal Xook’s bloodletting, on Yaxchilan Lintel 24Yaxchilan Lintel 24

Over a doorway of her own temple, Structure 23, Lady K’abal Xook kneels and pulls a rope studded with thorns through her tongue while King Itzamnaaj Bahlam III holds a torch over her. Alfred Maudslay had the lintel cut out in 1882; it is in the British Museum. Long Count 9.13.17.15.12 5 Eb 15 Mak

The Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquín de Alcubierre began tunnelling for Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples, down a well shaft that had struck the theatre’s stage in 1709. The town lay under some 20 metres of rock-hard volcanic deposit and modern Resina.

For over a century the kings of Naples dug for statues, bronzes and paintings for their museum at Portici, often by tunnel, often wall paintings cut out and the rest left to decay. The kingdom fell to Garibaldi in 1860, and the new Italian state put the digs on a systematic footing.

Hector Munro’s army beat the combined forces of the deposed nawab Mir Qasim, the nawab of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. With the emperor now in its camp, the Company could ask him for anything.

Hector Munro’s Company army beat the combined forces of the nawabs of Bengal and Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. The next year the emperor granted the Company the diwani of Bengal.

The greatest fishery and market on the river, where peoples from the plateau and the coast met to trade. Clark counted baskets of pounded salmon of 90 or 100 pounds stacked on the rocks. The party portaged 457 yards and hired local men to help. The Dalles Dam drowned the falls in 1957.

Silver became more radioactive on the wooden bench than on the marble one. Putting paraffin wax in the neutrons’ path multiplied it up to a hundredfold: collisions with hydrogen slowed the neutrons, and slow neutrons are captured far more readily. They tested it that afternoon in the goldfish…

The KGB arrested Oleg Penkovsky, the military intelligence colonel who had spied for Britain and the United States, in Moscow. He was tried and, in 1963, shot.

Kennedy told the world on television that the Soviet Union was building nuclear missile sites in Cuba, and announced a naval “quarantine.” Six days later Khrushchev agreed to take the missiles out. It was the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war; the catalogue’s Cuban Missile Crisis timeline…

Warned that Kennedy would speak on television, Khrushchev called the Presidium to the Kremlin at about 22:00 Moscow time, fearing an invasion of Cuba had begun. He ordered that no nuclear weapon be used without Moscow’s order, then slept in his clothes on an office sofa.

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. At 19:00 Washington time (02:00 in Moscow) Kennedy…

Hanoi sent its army south in a conventional invasion, with tanks, on three fronts: Quảng Trị, An Lộc and Kontum. Quảng Trị city fell on 1 May and was retaken in mid-September after months of fighting that left the Citadel in ruins. South Vietnam held, with American air power.

The first picture from the surface of another planet: flat, angular rocks under a sky bright as a cloudy day in Moscow. The lander lasted 53 minutes; its carrier became the first craft to orbit Venus.

India’s first Moon mission. Its Moon Impact Probe struck near the south pole on 14 November 2008, and NASA’s mapper on board found the signature of water spread thinly across the surface.

Cycling’s governing body accepted USADA’s findings and banned Armstrong for life. “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling,” said its president, Pat McQuaid.

The Tribunal ruled that abortion for severe or fatal fetal abnormality was unconstitutional. That ground had covered most of Poland’s legal abortions. Protests followed across the country. The ruling took effect on publication, 27 January 2021, leaving rape, incest and a threat to the woman’s life…