Category Archives: ~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

In Memory -1998 – A bomb exploded at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, AL, killing an off-duty policeman and severely wounding a nurse. Eric Rudolph was charged with this bombing and three other attacks in Atlanta.


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Emily Lyons, the victim of an ‘Army of God’ bombing at a Birmingham, Ala., women’s clinic, describes her horrific experience in this interview.

On Jan. 29, a nail-packed bomb exploded outside the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Ala., killing off-duty police officer Robert “Sande” Sanderson and maiming nurse Emily Lyons.

Lyons, the 42-year-old mother of two daughters, had her shins blasted away, her left eye destroyed and her right eye severely damaged. Her entire body was riddled with nails and shrapnel.

for more … splcenter.org

Eric Robert Rudolph (born September 19, 1966), also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American terrorist convicted for a series of anti-abortion and anti-gay -motivated bombings across the southern United States between 1996 and 1998, which killed three people and injured 150 others.

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on this day …


World1728 – John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was first performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, London.

1802 – John Beckley became the first Librarian of Congress.

1820 – Britain’s King George III died insane at Windsor Castle.

1845 – Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” was published for the first time in the “New York Evening Mirror.”

1848 – Greenwich Mean Time was adopted by Scotland.

1850 – Henry Clay introduced in the Senate a compromise bill on slavery that included the admission of California into the Union as a free state.

1856 – Britain’s highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross, was founded by Queen Victoria.

1861 – In America, Kansas became the 34th state of the Union.

1886 – The first successful petrol-driven motorcar, built by Karl Benz, was patented.

1916 – In World War I, Paris was bombed by German zeppelins for the first time.

1924 – R. Taylor patented the ice cream cone rolling machine.

1936 – The first members of major league baseball‘s Hall of Fame were named in Cooperstown, NY.

1940 – The W. Atlee Burpee Seed Company displayed the first tetraploid flowers at the New York City Flower Show.

1949 – “The Newport News” was commissioned as the first air-conditioned naval ship in Virginia.

1956 – “Indictment” debuted on CBS radio and stayed on the air for three years.

1958 – Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married.

1958 – Charles Starkweather was captured by police in Wyoming.

1963 – The first members to the NFL‘s Hall of Fame were named in Canton, OH.

1963 – Britain was refused entry into the EEC.

1966 – “Sweet Charity” opened at the Palace Theatre in New York City. It ran for 608 performances.

1979 – U.S. President Carter formally welcomed Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping to the White House. The visit followed the establishment of diplomatic relations.

1985 – The Dow Jones industrial average peaked at 1,292.62.

1987 – “Physician’s Weekly” announced that the smile on the face of Leonardo DeVinci’s Mona Lisa was caused by a “…facial paralysis resulting from a swollen nerve behind the ear.”

1990 – Joseph Hazelwood, the former skipper of the Exxon Valdez, went on trial in Anchorage, AK, on charges that stemmed from America’s worst oil spill. Hazelwood was later acquitted of all the major charges and was convicted of a misdemeanor.

1995 – The San Francisco 49ers became the first team in National Football League (NFL) history to win five Super Bowl titles. The 49ers defeated the San Diego Chargers 49-26.

1996 – French President Jacques Chirac announced the “definitive end” to nuclear testing.

1996 – La Fenice, the 204 year old opera house in Venice, was destroyed by fire. Arson was suspected.

1997 – America Online agreed to give refunds to frustrated customers under threat of lawsuits across the country. Customers were unable to log on after AOL offered a flat $19.95-a-month rate.

1998 – A bomb exploded at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, AL, killing an off-duty policeman and severely wounding a nurse. Eric Rudolph was charged with this bombing and three other attacks in Atlanta.

1999 – Paris prosecutors announced the end of the investigation into the accident that killed Britain’s Princess Diana.

2001 – In Indonesia, thousands of student protesters stormed the parliament property and demanded that President Abdurrahman Wahid quit due to his alleged involvement in two corruption scandals. Wahid announced that he would not resign.

2014 – Archaeologists announced that they had uncovered what they believed to be the oldest temple in Roman antiquity. The temple was found at the Sant’Omobono site in central Rome.

1917~ The Bath Riots


On the morning of January 28, 1917, a Mexican maid named Carmelita Torres refuses to put up with the indignity she has been made to suffer every morning since she started working across the border in the United States. Torres’ objection to the noxious chemical delousing visited upon Mexicans upon crossing the Northern border sparked what became known as the Bath Riots, an oft-overlooked moment in Chicano history.

Scared that a recent outbreak of typhus in Mexico could find its way to the United States, the Public Health Service instituted mandatory disinfecting for all Mexicans entering the country. The process was both humiliating and dangerous—men and women were directed to separate facilities, where they were made to strip off their clothes, which would be steamed. Officials examined the nude border-crossers and frequently doused them in harmful chemicals such as kerosene, a method which had resulted in the deaths of 27 prisoners in an El Paso prison in 1916.

Having heard that workers at the facility would regularly photograph women in the nude as they underwent this process, 17-year-old Torres refused to leave the trolley as it stopped at the Santa Fe Bridge border facility. Torres and her fellow passengers, most of whom were also young, female domestic workers, quickly seized four trolleys, hurling whatever they could find at the American authorities. A number of other Juárez residents joined them, and the ensuing riots lasted through the next day, although no one seems to have been seriously injured and there were only a few arrests.

Source: history.com for the complete article

This was a horrendous, seemingly misogynistic, and dangerous thing to have happened!

1844 – Richard Theodore Greener became the first African American to graduate from Harvard University.


Richard Theodore Greener (30 January 1844 – 2 May 1922) was the first African-American graduate of Harvard College and dean of the Howard University School of Law.

Richard Greener was born in Philadelphia in 1844 and moved with his mother to Boston when he was about nine years old. He quit school in his mid-teens to earn money for his family, but one of his employers helped him to enroll in preparatory school at Oberlin College. He studied at Phillips Academy and graduated in 1865. After three years at Oberlin, Greener transferred to Harvard College and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1870. After teaching for two years at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and then serving as principal at the Preparatory School for Colored Children in Washington, D.C., Greener accepted the professorship of mental and moral philosophy at the University of South Carolina in October 1873

Richard Theodore Greener graduated from Harvard College in 1870, the first African American to do so. Gifted, hardworking, and ambitious, Greener followed this achievement with a lifetime of accomplishment as an educator, scholar, lawyer, politician, and diplomat. He also contended with painful choices about how best to survive and prosper in a country that denied people of color respect and equal rights

for more … worldhistoryproject.org

image from …   backthen.com

Official Google blog – This was or still is Data Privacy Day…


GOOGLe

Google’s approach to government requests for user data

Posted: 27 Jan 2013 10:07 PM PST – It’s 2024, does this still exist ?

Today, January 28, is Data Privacy Day, when the world recognizes the importance of preserving your online privacy and security.
If it’s like most other days, Google—like many companies that provide online services to users—will receive dozens of letters, faxes and emails from government agencies and courts around the world requesting access to our users’ private account information. Typically this happens in connection with government investigations.
It’s important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe. We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information.
To strike this balance, we’re focused on three initiatives that I’d like to share, so you know what Google is doing to protect your privacy and security.
First, for several years we have advocated for updating laws like the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents. We’ll continue this effort strongly in 2013 through our membership in the Digital Due Process coalition and other initiatives.
Second, we’ll continue our long-standing strict process for handling these kinds of requests. When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things:

  • We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.
  • We evaluate the scope of the request. If it’s overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request. We do this frequently.
  • We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.
  • We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user’s search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.

And third, we work hard to provide you with information about government requests. Today, for example, we’ve added a new section to our Transparency Report that answers many questions you might have. And last week we released data showing that government requests continue to rise, along with additional details on the U.S. legal processes—such as subpoenas, court orders and warrants—that government use to compel us to provide this information.
We’re proud of our approach, and we believe it’s the right way to make sure governments can pursue legitimate investigations while we do our best to protect your privacy and security.

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer