On this day:

GOAT gone.

raratt said:

GOAT gone.

Tom Brady officially announces retirement from NFL after 22 seasons

Brady's retirement was first reported on Saturday. He made it official on Tuesday.

www.yahoo.com

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The last couple of years I've really liked him. Not so much before that.

On this day, 11 years ago @neosapien and his wife eloped to Las Vegas!

BarnBuster said:

On this day, 11 years ago @neosapien and his wife eloped to Las Vegas!

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I just checked the day and date again. We are correct lol.

The United Service Organizations, popularly known as the USO, was incorporated in New York on February 4, 1941, to provide recreational opportunities and resources for members of the U.S. armed forces on leave.

At the recommendation of President Franklin Roosevelt, the task was put in the hands of existing public service organizations. The USO was organized by representatives of six social service organizations as a private, nonprofit organization. The organizers included the Jewish Welfare Board, the National Catholic Community Service, the Salvation Army, the Travelers Aid Association of America, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Over the course of World War II, the USO boasted more than 1 million civilian volunteers and operated more than 3,000 recreational clubs. Set up quickly in churches, museums, barns, railroad cars, storefronts, and other locales, USO clubs were places for both lively social activity and quiet contemplation. Some soldiers came to dance and watch movies, others to pursue traveler’s information or assistance, still others to write letters, lounge, eat, or seek religious counsel.

Soon after the founding of the USO, the organization created a subsidiary, Camp Shows Inc., to produce professional-quality shows with volunteers from the entertainment world. Traveling shows, which included dramatic and musical performances, vaudeville-style revues and beyond, featured well-known performers such as Bob Hope, Joe E. Brown, Lena Horn and Joan Blondell, as well as many other actors and production staff members from stage and screen.

The USO was disbanded in 1947, then reorganized during the Korean War and expanded considerably during the Vietnam War. It continues to provide a variety of services to members of the armed forces and their families.

"On February 6, 1952, after a long illness, King George VI of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dies in his sleep at the royal estate at Sandringham. Princess Elizabeth, the oldest of the king’s two daughters and next in line to succeed him, was in Kenya at the time of her father’s death; she was crowned Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953, at age 27.

King George VI, the second son of King George V, ascended to the throne in 1936 after his older brother, King Edward VIII, voluntarily abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. During World War II, George worked to rally the spirits of the British people by touring war zones, making a series of morale-boosting radio broadcasts (for which he overcame a speech impediment) and shunning the safety of the countryside to remain with his wife in bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace. The king's health deteriorated in 1949, but he continued to perform state duties until his death in 1952.

Queen Elizabeth, born on April 21, 1926, and known to her family as Lilibet, was groomed as a girl to succeed her father. She married a distant cousin, Philip Mountbatten, on November 20, 1947, at London’s Westminster Abbey. The first of Elizabeth’s four children, Prince Charles, was born in 1948.

From the start of her reign, Elizabeth understood the value of public relations and allowed her 1953 coronation to be televised, despite objections from Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others who felt it would cheapen the ceremony. Elizabeth, the 40th British monarch since William the Conqueror, has worked hard at her royal duties and become a popular figure around the world. In 2022, she will celebrate 70 years on the throne, the only British monarch to do so.

The queen’s reign, however, has not been without controversy. She was seen as cold and out-of-touch following the 1996 divorce of her son, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana, and again after Diana’s 1997 death in a car crash. Additionally, the role in modern times of the monarchy, which is largely ceremonial, has come into question as British taxpayers have complained about covering the royal family’s travel expenses and palace upkeep. Still, the royals are effective world ambassadors for Britain and a huge tourism draw. Today, the queen, an avid horsewoman and Corgi dog lover, is one of the world’s wealthiest women, with extensive real-estate holdings and art and jewelry collection."

Feb. 6, 1959: Titan Launches; Cold War Heats Up

lokie said:

View attachment 5080893
Feb. 6, 1959: Titan Launches; Cold War Heats Up

Feb. 6, 1959: Titan Launches; Cold War Heats Up

The United States successfully test-fires its first Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile. The threat of global nuclear holocaust moves from the plausible to the likely.

www.wired.com

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I worked on those, under Kansas.

raratt said:

I worked on those, under Kansas.

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Cousin James was out there too. All my life I had heard about him being in the rocket force. Then he went to NASA after that, and then Lockheed Martin and after that a sub contractor of Lockheed. He has moved up here to the sandhills from Cocoa in the last few years after he had retired for about the 4th or 5th time. One day I ask him exactly what he had done, and much to my surprise I found out he wrote instruction manuals. So there is a good chance he wrote the manuals you used when you worked on the Titans.

On February 8, 1915, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a landmark film in the history of cinema, premieres at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. The film was America’s first feature-length motion picture and a box-office smash, and during its unprecedented three hours Griffith popularized countless filmmaking techniques that remain central to the art today. However, because of its explicit racism, Birth of a Nation is also regarded as one of the most offensive films ever made. Actually titled The Clansman for its first month of release, the film provides a highly subjective history of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Studied today as a masterpiece of political propaganda, Birth of a Nation caused riots in several cities and was banned in others but was seen by millions.

David Wark Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky, in 1875, the son of an ex-Confederate colonel. His father died when he was seven, and he later dropped out of high school to help support his family. After holding various jobs, he began a successful career as a theater actor. He wrote several plays and, on the advice of a colleague, sent some scenarios for one-reel films to the Edison Film Company and the Biograph Company. In 1908, he was hired as an actor and writer for the Biograph studio and soon was promoted to a position as director.

Between 1908 and 1913, Griffith made more than 400 short films for Biograph. With the assistance of his talented cinematographer, G W. “Billy” Bitzer, he invented or refined such important cinematic techniques as the close-up, the scenic long shot, the moving-camera shot, and the fade-in and fade-out. His contributions to the art of editing during this period include the flashback and parallel editing, in which two or more separate scenes are intermixed to give the impression that the separate actions are happening simultaneously. He also raised the standard on movie acting, initiating scene rehearsals before shooting and assembling a stock company of film professionals. Many of these actors, including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, and Lionel Barrymore, went on to become some of Hollywood’s first movie stars.

Taking his cue from the longer spectacle films produced in Italy, in 1913 Griffith produced Judith of Bethulia, a biblical adaptation that, at four reels, was close to an hour long. It was his last Biograph film. Two years later, he released his 10-reel film, Birth of a Nation, for Mutual Films.

Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, tells the turbulent story of American history in the 1860s, as it followed the fictional lives of two families from the North and the South. Throughout its three hours, African Americans are portrayed as brutish, lazy, morally degenerate and dangerous. In the film’s climax, the Ku Klux Klan rises up to save the South from the Reconstruction Era-prominence of African Americans in Southern public life.

Riots and protests broke out at screenings of Birth of a Nation in a number of Northern cities, and the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) embarked on a major campaign to have the film banned. It eventually was censored in several cities, and Griffith agreed to change or cut out some of the film’s especially offensive scenes.

Nevertheless, millions of people paid to witness the spectacle of Birth of a Nation, which featured a cast of more 10,000 people and a dramatic story line far more sophisticated than anything released to that date. For all the gross historical inaccuracies, certain scenes, such as meetings of Congress, Civil War battles, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, were meticulously recreated, lending the film an air of legitimacy that made it so effective as propaganda.

The Ku Klux Klan, suppressed by the federal government in the 1870s, was re-founded in Georgia in December 1915 by William J. Simmons. In addition to being anti-Black, the new Klan was anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant, and by the early 1920s it had spread throughout the North as well as the South. At the peak of its strength in 1924, membership in the KKK is estimated to have been as high as three million. There is no doubt that Birth of a Nation played no small part in winning wide public acceptance for an organization that was originally founded as an anti-Black and anti-federal terrorist group.

Of Griffith’s later films, Intolerance (1916) is the most important. Hailed by many as the finest achievement of the silent-film era, it pursues four story lines simultaneously, which cumulatively act to prove humanity’s propensity for persecution. Some regard it as an effort at atonement by Griffith for Birth of a Nation, while others believe he meant it as an answer to those who persecuted him for his political views. Intolerance was a commercial failure but had a significant influence on the development of film art.

Griffith went on to make 27 more films. In 1919, he founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin.

Before D. W. Griffith’s time, motion pictures were short, uninspiring, and poorly produced, acted and edited. Under his guidance, filmmaking became an art form. Despite the harm his Birth of a Nation inflicted on African Americans, he will forever be regarded as the father of cinema.

While most people know that students were killed at Kent State in 1970, very few know about the murder of students at Jackson State (1970) and even less about South Carolina State College in Orangeburg (1968 ).

On Feb. 8, 1968, 28 students were injured and three were killed — most shot in the back by the state police while involved in a peaceful protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina. One of the by-standers, Cleveland Sellers, was arrested for inciting a riot and sentenced to a year of in prison. Later serving as president of Voorhees College, he was the only person to do time.


The three young men who were murdered: Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond, both SCSU students, and Delano Middleton, a local student at Wilkinson High School.

In 1968, although home to two Black colleges and a majority Black population, Orangeburg’s economic and political power remained exclusively in the hands of whites. When a Black Vietnam War veteran was denied access to a nearby bowling alley, one of the last segregated facilities in town, 300 protesters from South Carolina State College and Claflin University converged on the alley in a non-violent demonstration. A melee with the police ensued during which police beat two female students; the incensed students then smashed the windows of white-owned businesses along the route back to campus. The Governor sent in the state police and National Guard.

By the late evening of Feb. 8, army tanks and over 100 heavily armed law enforcement officers had cordoned off the campus; 450 more had been stationed downtown. About 200 students milled around a bonfire on S.C. State’s campus; a fire truck with armed escort was sent in. Without warning the crackle of shotgun fire shattered the cold night air. It lasted less than ten seconds. When it was over, twenty-eight students lay on State’s campus with multiple buckshot wounds; three others had been killed. Almost all were shot in the back or side. Students and police vividly describe what they experienced that night.

Journalists remember that the Governor and law enforcement officials on the scene claimed police had fired in self-defense. The Associated Press’ initial account, carried in newspapers the morning after the shooting, misreported what happened as “an exchange of gunfire.” The source, an AP photographer on the scene, subsequently revealed that he heard no gunfire from the campus.

In Orangeburg, police fingered Cleveland Sellers as the inevitable “outside agitator” who, they claimed, had incited the students. Twenty-three years old, he had returned home, leaving his position as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) program director, to organize black consciousness groups on South Carolina campuses. Sellers had already attracted the attention of law enforcement officials as a friend of SNCC head Stokely Carmichael, who had frightened many Americans with his call for “Black Power.” Carmichael’s ideas articulated the Movement’s shift from a focus on integration to one of gaining political and economic power within the black community.

South Carolina officials saw Sellers as a direct challenge to their power. Wounded in the massacre, Sellers was arrested at the hospital and charged with “inciting to riot.” Though students made clear he was only minimally involved with their demonstrations, Sellers was tried and sentenced to one year of hard labor. He was finally pardoned 23 years after the incident. The U.S. Justice Department charged the nine police officers who admitted shooting that night with abuse of power. However, neither of two South Carolina juries would uphold the charges.

On February 9, 1971, pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige becomes the first Negro League veteran to be nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame. In August of that year, Paige, a pitching legend known for his fastball, showmanship and the longevity of his playing career, which spanned five decades, was inducted. Joe DiMaggio once called Paige “the best and fastest pitcher I’ve ever faced.”

Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, most likely on July 7, 1906, although the exact date remains a mystery. He earned his nickname, Satchel, as a boy when he earned money carrying passengers’ bags at train stations. Baseball was segregated when Paige started playing baseball professionally in the 1920s, so he spent most of his career pitching for Negro League teams around the United States. During the winter season, he pitched for teams in the Caribbean and Central and South America. As a barnstorming player who traveled thousands of miles each season and played for whichever team met his asking price, he pitched an estimated 2,500 games, had 300 shut-outs and 55 no-hitters. In one month in 1935, he reportedly pitched 29 consecutive games.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and became the first African American to play in the Major Leagues when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. The following year, Paige also entered the majors, signing with the Cleveland Guardians (then known as the Cleveland Indians) and becoming, at age 42, baseball’s oldest rookie. He helped the Guardians win the pennant that year and later played for the St. Louis Browns and Kansas City A’s.

Paige retired from the majors in 1953, but returned in 1965 to pitch three innings for the Kansas City A’s. He was 59 at the time, making him the oldest person ever to play in the Major Leagues. In addition to being famous for his talent and longevity, Paige was also well-known for his sense of humor and colorful observations on life, including: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you” and “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

Satchel Paige

Leroy “Satchel” Paige was bigger than mere numbers.

baseballhall.org

Nelson Mandela, leader of the movement to end South African apartheid, is released from prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990.

In 1944, Mandela, a lawyer, joined the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest Black political organization in South Africa, where he became a leader of Johannesburg’s youth wing of the ANC. In 1952, he became deputy national president of the ANC, advocating nonviolent resistance to apartheid—South Africa’s institutionalized system of white supremacy and racial segregation. However, after the massacre of peaceful Black demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960, Nelson helped organize a paramilitary branch of the ANC to engage in guerrilla warfare against the white minority government.

In 1961, he was arrested for treason, and although acquitted he was arrested again in 1962 for illegally leaving the country. Convicted and sentenced to five years at Robben Island Prison, he was put on trial again in 1964 on charges of sabotage. In June 1964, he was convicted along with several other ANC leaders and sentenced to life in prison.

Mandela spent the first 18 of his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison. Confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing, he was forced to do hard labor in a quarry. He could write and receive a letter once every six months, and once a year he was allowed to meet with a visitor for 30 minutes. However, Mandela’s resolve remained unbroken, and while remaining the symbolic leader of the anti-apartheid movement, he led a movement of civil disobedience at the prison that coerced South African officials into drastically improving conditions on Robben Island. He was later moved to another location, where he lived under house arrest.

In 1989, F.W. de Klerk became South African president and set about dismantling apartheid. De Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC, suspended executions, and in February 1990 ordered the release of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela subsequently led the ANC in its negotiations with the minority government for an end to apartheid and the establishment of a multiracial government. In 1993, Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One year later, the ANC won an electoral majority in the country’s first free elections, and Mandela was elected South Africa’s president.

Mandela retired from politics in 1999, but remained a global advocate for peace and social justice until his death in December 2013.

The Day Nelson Mandela Walked Out Of Prison

When the anti-apartheid leader emerged from 27 years of confinement, South Africans knew their country was undergoing a seismic change. But they didn't know where it would lead them.

www.npr.org

February 12, 1973, a C-141A Starlifter transport jet with a distinctive red cross on its tail lifted off from Hanoi, North Vietnam, and the first flight of 40 U.S. prisoners of war began their journey home through Operation Homecoming. By the day's end, three C-141A aircraft would lift off from Hanoi, as well as a C-9A aircraft from Saigon, South Vietnam. In a steady flow of flights through late March 1973 under terms set through the Paris Peace Accords, 591 POWs returned to American soil.

Americans were spellbound as they watched news clips of the POWs being carried in stretchers or walking tentatively toward U.S. officers at the awaiting aircraft for the first flight from Hanoi's Gia Lam Airport.

The first man in the group to touch the mainland of the United States was Capt. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr. of the Navy, the senior officer in the group. In a brief speech, he recalled that during their captivity, the men would signal to each other that they had heard good news by whistling “California Here I Come.”

“Usually we knew we were whistling in the dark,” Captain Denton said in an emotional voice. “But now we can thank God it has come true.” Later, in an interview, Captain Denton was asked how he and the other men could endure their imprisonment. “I believe that over 99 per cent of us would say that it was faith in God, and second, faith in country,” he replied."

"The famous Peanuts comic strip appeared for the final time on February 13, 2000 – just one day after their creator, Charles M Schulz, died of colon cancer.

The adventures of Charlie Brown, his friends and his beagle Snoopy had turned the strip into an international success, translated into 21 languages and read in 75 countries.

The final edition took the form of a message from Schulz to his readers, presented next to a picture of Snoopy typing on top of his kennel with further images from the strip’s history above it.

“I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost 50 years. It has been the fulfillment of my childhood ambition,” read the cartoonist’s message. “Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how can I ever forget them...”

One of the images included in that final collage of memories features poor 'ol Charlie Brown failing to connect with an American football placed in front of him - and snatched away - by his perennial foil, Lucy.


Schultz admitted that this reoccurring gag brought tears to his eyes as he signed off the final strip. He said: “All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick - he never had a chance to kick the football!'”

Schulz had successfully pitched his idea for a four-panel cartoon to the United Feature Syndicate in 1950, and the first edition of Peanuts appeared on October 2 of the same year, printed daily in seven newspapers. Years later, at its height, the strip could be seen in 2,600 publications worldwide.

Peanuts also proved a huge hit in other media. The first anthology book of its best moments was published in 1952, while popular animated versions of the strip for television began with the Emmy-winning 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' in 1965.

With its humour, its philosophical nature and its highly-recognisable cast of characters led by a good kid lacking in confidence but full of persistence, Peanuts was a huge influence on modern newspaper cartoons and remains the most popular and successful comic strip of all time."

On February 14, 2018, an expelled student entered Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and opened fire, killing 17 people and wounding 17 others, in what became the deadliest shooting at a high school in United States history.

Dressed in a maroon shirt adorned with the school logo, Nikolas Cruz exited his Uber outside the campus at 2:19 p.m. He approached the school wearing a backpack filled with magazines and carrying a black duffel packed with his legally purchased AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

School staff had been warned after Cruz’s expulsion for "disciplinary reasons" in 2017 that the troubled teen was a risk to student safety. So when a staff member saw him outside, he radioed a “Code Red” to initiate a lockdown of the school. It was too late.

Cruz entered the high school’s Freshman Building, on campus—which was mostly filled with freshman students—at 2:21 p.m. and unpacked his rifle in a stairwell. According to NBC Miami, freshman Chris McKenna, 15, spotted Cruz there and received a chilling warning from the gunman. “You better get out of here. Things are going to start getting messy.” McKenna ran outside, where he spotted Aaron Feis, a coach and school security monitor who took him to the baseball field 500 feet away and turned back to “check it out.”

Cruz exited the stairwell into a first-floor hallway, firing a stream of bullets down the corridor, shattering windows and shooting through doors. In just under two minutes, he murdered 11 people and injured 13 others. He then headed up the stairs. He was on the second floor for less than a minute, firing but hitting no one, before going to the third floor where he killed his last six victims, and injured four more in the final 45 seconds of the attack.

Terrified students ran for their lives. Others remained holed up, hiding in classrooms, closets and bathrooms, desperate to reach their parents. Many began broadcasting the horror on social media through video and live posts.

According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Cruz left the hallways and went to the faculty lounge, where he set up a bipod—like a tripod on which to rest the gun—reloaded his weapon and began firing, like a sniper, at the fleeing students outside. Only hurricane impact-resistant glass in the windows kept the death toll from growing.

In all, Cruz’s attack lasted less than four minutes and left 17 dead. At 2:28 p.m., just seven minutes after entering the building, he ditched the rifle in another stairwell and left the school, attempting to blend in with the crowd of escaping students. The gunman successfully left the campus, running to a Walmart at 2:50 p.m, stopping at a Subway restaurant to get a drink and eventually heading to McDonalds. He was apprehended shortly thereafter after being spotted by a Broward County police officer.

“He looked like a typical high school student, and for a quick moment I thought, ‘Could this be the person who I need to stop?’” said Officer Michael Leonard in an interview after arresting Cruz.

Broward Sheriff's deputy school resource officer Scot Peterson, who was assigned to the school that day, would later be accused of retreating during the shooting while victims were still under attack. Peterson was arrested in June 2019 and faced charges of neglect of a child, culpable negligence and perjury.

The devastation felt by the Florida community—once considered the safest city in the state—was immeasurable. Previous school shootings throughout the country had prompted Stoneman Douglas (and other schools) to practice active shooter drills, and the school had employed an armed officer on campus. But it hadn’t been enough to stop the carnage. Chants for “No More Guns!” broke out at candlelight vigils and over a thousand people showed up to funerals in the days after.

Student survivors took to social media to make their anger known, giving interviews and becoming activists for gun safety legislation. One student, David Hogg, went from school newspaper reporter to activist when his plea to legislators in a CNN interview went viral.

“Please, take action,” he begged lawmakers.

On March 24, less than six weeks after their lives were shattered by violence, students helped organize the March for Our Lives, a demonstration in support of gun violence prevention. Students across the country were encouraged to stage walkouts, and a rally was held in Washington, D.C. There, anti-gun violence protesters from around the country—some survivors of school shootings, and others whose daily lives were affected by gun violence—celebrities, and other activists, spoke to a crowd of thousands, demanding legislative change.

Three weeks later, Florida Governor Rick Scott, a supporter of the NRA, responded. He signed a bill imposing a 21-year-old legal age requirement for gun purchases and a three-day waiting period on all gun transactions. The law also controversially permitted the arming of some school employees.

Nikolas Cruz was charged with 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. He later pleaded guilty to all charges.

Oregon officially became part of the United States on February 14, 1859.

A massive explosion of unknown origin sinks the battleship USS Maine in Cuba’s Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260 of the fewer than 400 American crew members aboard.

One of the first American battleships, the Maine weighed more than 6,000 tons and was built at a cost of more than $2 million. Ostensibly on a friendly visit, the Maine had been sent to Cuba to protect the interests of Americans there after a rebellion against Spanish rule broke out in Havana in January.

An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly placing the blame on Spain. Much of Congress and a majority of the American public expressed little doubt that Spain was responsible and called for a declaration of war.

Subsequent diplomatic failures to resolve the Maine matter, coupled with United States indignation over Spain’s brutal suppression of the Cuban rebellion and continued losses to American investment, led to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898.

Within three months, the United States had decisively defeated Spanish forces on land and sea, and in August an armistice halted the fighting. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the United States and Spain, officially ending the Spanish-American War and granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

Over a half-century later, in 1974, Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover conducted a study of his own. He concluded that a fire had started by spontaneous
combustion in some accumulated coal dust in one of the ship's coal storage bunkers. The heat from this fire, Rickover said, ignited the ammunition magazine and blew up the Maine.

More recently, in 1995, Peggy and Harold Samuels published their own study. It questions many of Rickover's conclusions, and cites other evidence to suggest that the Maine was sunk by a mine after all. The Samuels believe it was a small mine that, by unlucky coincidence, happened to explode below the Maine's mostvulnerable location, the ship's ammunition magazine, and caused the larger blast.

Rickover Report, How the USN Battleship was Destroyed

https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/education/review-activity-america-and-the-world/primary-source-sheets.pdf

"On February 16, 1923, in Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist Howard Carter enters the sealed burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler King Tutankhamen.

Because the ancient Egyptians saw their pharaohs as gods, they carefully preserved their bodies after death, burying them in elaborate tombs containing rich treasures to accompany the rulers into the afterlife. In the 19th century, archeologists from all over the world flocked to Egypt, where they uncovered a number of these tombs. Many had long ago been broken into by robbers and stripped of their riches.

When Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he became convinced there was at least one undiscovered tomb–that of the little known Tutankhamen, or King Tut, who lived around 1400 B.C. and died when he was still a teenager. Backed by a rich Brit, Lord Carnarvon, Carter searched for five years without success. In early 1922, Lord Carnarvon wanted to call off the search, but Carter convinced him to hold on one more year.

In November 1922, the wait paid off, when Carter’s team found steps hidden in the debris near the entrance of another tomb. The steps led to an ancient sealed doorway bearing the name Tutankhamen. When Carter and Lord Carnarvon entered the tomb’s interior chambers on November 26, they were thrilled to find it virtually intact, with its treasures untouched after more than 3,000 years. The men began exploring the four rooms of the tomb, and on February 16, 1923, under the watchful eyes of a number of important officials, Carter opened the door to the last chamber.

Inside lay a sarcophagus with three coffins nested inside one another. The last coffin, made of solid gold, contained the mummified body of King Tut. Among the riches found in the tomb–golden shrines, jewelry, statues, a chariot, weapons, clothing–the perfectly preserved mummy was the most valuable, as it was the first one ever to be discovered. Despite rumors that a curse would befall anyone who disturbed the tomb, its treasures were carefully catalogued, removed and included in a famous traveling exhibition called the “Treasures of Tutankhamen.” The exhibition’s permanent home is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo."

On February 18, 2001, Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of the intelligence services of the former Soviet Union and its successors. He pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage on July 6, 2001 and was sentenced to prison without the possibility of parole. Hanssen is Federal Bureau of Prisons prisoner #48551-083. He is serving his sentence at the ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado, in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Hanssen is considered the most damaging spy in FBI history.