The Almanac
Today is Monday, Feb. 8, the 39th day of 2016 with 327 to follow. The
moon is new. Morning stars are Mercury and Venus. Evening stars are
Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Those born on this date are
under the sign of Aquarius. They include Civil War-era U.S. Gen.
William Tecumseh Sherman in 1820; pioneer science fiction writer Jules
Verne in 1828; Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who devised the
periodic table, in 1834; actor Charles Ruggles in 1886; actor Edith
Evans in 1888; film director King Vidor in 1894; Chester Carlson,
inventor of the Xerox copying process, in 1906; actor Lana Turner in
1921; actor Audrey Meadows in 1922; actor Jack Lemmon in 1925; actor
Alejandro Rey in 1930 ; actor James Dean in 1931; Oscar-winning
composer/conductor John Williams in 1932 (age 84); television
journalist Ted Koppel in 1940 (age 76); actor Nick Nolte in 1941 (age
75); folk singer Tom Rush in 1941 (age 75); comedian Robert Klein in
1942 (age 74); singer Ron Tyson (The Temptations) in 1948 (age 68);
actor Brooke Adams in 1949 (age 67); actor Mary Steenburgen in 1953
(age 63); author John Grisham in 1955 (age 61); Philippines President
Benigno Aquino III in 1960 (age 56); actor Gary Coleman in 1968; actor
Seth Green in 1974 (age 42); surfer Bethany Hamilton in 1990 (age 26).
On this date in history: In 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded,
charged with conspiring to kill England's Queen Elizabeth I. In 1692, a
doctor in Massachusetts Bay Colony said two village girls were possibly
bewitched, a charge that set off the Salem witch trials. In 1693, the
College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., was granted a charter
by Britain's King William III. In 1725, Peter the Great, emperor of
Russia, died and was succeeded by his wife, Catherine. In 1915, D.W.
Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a landmark in the history of cinema
and the first American full-length motion picture, opened in Los
Angeles and was immediately a smash hit though many found its treatment
of race offensive. In 1933, two British Royal Air Force pilots landed
at Walvis Bay, 800 miles north of Cape Town, South Africa, setting a
non-stop flight record after traveling 5,175 miles from England. In
1940, Nazis shot every 10th person in two Polish villages near Warsaw
in reprisal for the deaths of two German soldiers. In 1960, the first
plaques installed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame honored Olive Borden,
Ronald Colman, Louise Fazenda, Preston Foster, Burt Lancaster, Edward
Sedgwick Ernest Torrence and Joanne Woodward. In 1968, Robert Kennedy,
attacked the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policies, saying: it is
time for the truth -- time to drop the mask of official illusion, which
he said had been shattered by Communist attacks in Saigon and cities
and towns all across South Vietnam. In 1974, three U.S. Skylab
astronauts ended an 84-day orbital flight. In 2002, the Olympic Winter
Games opened in Salt Lake City. In 2007, Anna Nicole Smith, a
39-year-old actor, model and tabloid fixture, was found dead in a
Hollywood, Fla., hotel. Her death was attributed to accidental sedative
overdose. In 2013, Jeffrey Delisle, a junior Canadian naval officer who
pleaded guilty to selling military secrets to Russia, was sentenced to
20 years in prison. In 2014, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder
announced that the federal government would soon treat people in
same-sex marriages the same as heterosexual couples in court cases,
such as jointly filing for bankruptcy and declining to testify against
a spouse. A thought for the day: We owe our children, the most
vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear.
-- Nelson Mandela .