The Almanac
Today is Tuesday, Aug. 30, the 243rd day of 2016 with 123 to follow.
The moon is waning. Morning stars are Neptune and Uranus. Evening stars
are Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Neptune. Those born on this date
are under the sign of Virgo. They include English author Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley ( Frankenstein ) in 1797; Louisiana Gov. Huey
Long in 1893; journalist/author John Gunther in 1901; civil rights
leader Roy Wilkins in 1901; actor Raymond Massey in 1896; actor Shirley
Booth in 1898; actor Joan Blondell in 1906; actor Fred MacMurray in
1908; baseball Hall of Fame member Ted Williams in 1918; country music
singer Kitty Wells in 1919; businessman Warren Buffett in 1930 (age
86); musician John Phillips (The Mamas and the Papas) in 1935; actor
Elizabeth Ashley in 1939 (age 77); French Olympic champion skier
Jean-Claude Killy in 1943 (age 73); cartoonist Robert Crumb in 1943
(age 73); newspaper columnist Molly Ivins in 1944; comedian Lewis Black
in 1948 (age 68); basketball Hall of Fame member Robert Parish in 1953
(age 63); actor Peggy Lipton in 1946 (age 70); actor Timothy Bottoms in
1951 (age 65); actor Michael Chiklis in 1963 (age 53), actor Michael
Michele in 1966 (age 50); actor Cameron Diaz in 1972 (age 44); tennis
player Andy Roddick in 1982 (age 34). On this date in history: In 30
B.C., Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and lover of Julius Caesar and Mark
Antony, committed suicide following the defeat of her forces by
Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome. In 1780, Gen. Benedict
Arnold betrayed the United States when he promised secretly to
surrender the fort at West Point to the British army. He fled to
England and died in poverty. In 1941, German forces began the 900-day
siege of Leningrad. When it ended, the Russian city lay in ruins and
hundreds of thousands of people had died. In 1967, the nomination of
Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court was confirmed. Marshall was
the first African-American to sit on the court. In 1983, Guion Bluford
became the first African-American astronaut in space. In 1994, the
Lockheed and Martin Marietta corporations agreed to a merger that would
create the largest U.S. defense contractor. In 2003, more than 120
people, including prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir
al-Hakim, were killed in a bomb attack on Iraq's Imam Ali Mosque. In
2005, on the day after Hurricane Katrina struck, 80 percent of New
Orleans was flooded. Electricity, water, sewage, communication and
transportation systems were out. Three-fourths of all houses were
reported damaged or destroyed. Thousands of people were rescued, many
plucked from rooftops, and some sought shelter in the Superdome. In
other areas along the Gulf of Mexico, Katrina flattened much of
Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., flooded Mobile, Ala., and heavily damaged
smaller towns in between. The Katrina death toll would top 1,800. In
2008, thousands of residents of Mexico City, Tijuana and other cities
in Mexico took to the streets to protest an epidemic of drug-related
killings and kidnappings and the Mexican government's apparent
inability to stop them. In 2011, two senior U.S. Justice Department
officials charged with overseeing the failed government gun-smuggling
sting operation dubbed Fast and Furious were replaced amid bitter
congressional criticism of the mission. The plan was to pass thousands
of weapons to suspected Mexican gun smugglers and trace them to drug
leaders, but hundreds of firearms were lost, some showing up at crime
scenes, including the 2010 slaying of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. In
2012, a judge sentenced former University of Virginia student George
Huguely V to 23 years in prison for the murder of Yeardley Love, his
former girlfriend. Both had been lacrosse players at the university. In
2013, Northern Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney died in
Dublin. He was 74. A thought for the day: Actress Julia Roberts said,
You can be true to the character all you want but you've got to go home
with yourself. .
