Volume 268 | No. 19

2023—An ex-U.S. President is indicted again: 37 felonies for unlawful possession of national secrets. 2016—Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager meet at Trump Tower with a whole slew of Russians with peculiar associations. 1989—James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, admits to a House committee that he was paid $400,000 for making a few phone calls on a topic about which he knew nothing. 1978—The Mormon Church drops its longstanding policy of excluding Black men from the priesthood. 1963—Winona, Miss. jail inmates do as cops say, nearly beating civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer to death. 1958—Auberon Waugh, a British writer, shakes the barrel of …

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2003—Condoleeza Rice admits Pres. George W.[MD] Bush’s State of the Union claim that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger was “wrong.” 1991—In a National Victory Celebration, Abrams tanks and 85° heat wreck D.C.’s Constitution Ave. 1967—Israeli planes and boats attack the unarmed U.S. spy ship Liberty with rockets, machine guns, and napalm; 34 sailors are killed, 171 wounded. 1966—Five U.S.A.F. jets fly in formation over Barstow, Calif., for a photo requested by GE marketers. Two crash, including the Valkyrie, worth $5 billion in today’s money. Two pilots die. 1956—Tech. Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr. becomes the first U.S. serviceman to die in Vietnam. He’s …

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2018—Attacked by a bobcat in her Georgia driveway, DeDe Phillips, 46, strangles the rabid animal. 1997—At the fed-funded Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico, activists are arrested for passing out copies of the Bill of Rights. 1971—An article in the Armed Forces Journal says “our army…in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse.” 1971—Busted for “disturbing the peace” in a California courthouse [i.e., wearing a jacket with “Fuck The Draft” on the back], Paul Cohen is sprung by the U.S. Supreme Court. 1969—Marine PFC Dan Bullock is KIA in Vietnam. He is 15, and Black. His enlistment is deemed “fraudulent,” so he’s denied …

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2002—Donald Rumsfeld explains to the unknowing that unknown unknowns are “things we do not know we don’t know”—and he should know. 2001—Florida man Vance Flosenzier drags a seven-foot shark from shallow water; paramedics drag his nephew Jesse Arbogast’s arm from its mouth; doctors successfully re-attach the arm. 1989—At a chaotic funeral attended by 10 million, Ayatolla Khomeini is twice jostled out of his coffin. 1989—Nuclear weapon manufacturing ends at Rocky Flats, Colo. when FBI and EPA agents raid the joint. 1980—Nuclear-armed B-52s go on alert for the second time in three days; a glitchy computer warns that 2,000 Soviet ICBMs are attacking the U.S. 1978—Voters …

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2013—News outlets reveal that the NSA, under a Top Secret court order, has been Hoovering™ up the phone records of millions of Americans. 2008—Despite Mayoral objections and a lack of public hearings, Blackwater opens a training facility in San Diego; a judge says Blackwater’s a person whose rights must not be violated. 2003—Two top editors at the New York Times resign in disgrace. Inexplicably, many other journos do not. 1989—One man stops a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, for a while. 1976—In Idaho, the $100 million federal Teton Dam fails, killing 14 and causing $2 billion in damages. 1970—Nixon orders the bosses of the …

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2017—It’s the last “Last Call” at Portsmouth’s Press Room. 2006—A Ukrainian man enters the lion cage at the Kiev zoo, saying “God will save me, if he exists.” He does not. 2004—Marvin Heemeyer destroys the Granby, Colo. Town Hall, the mayor’s home, and 11 other buildings with his home-made armored bulldozer because “God has asked me to do this.” Then he shoots himself. 2003—Feds get tough on white collar crime, i.e., Martha Stewart. 1989—The Peoples Liberation Army kills thousands at Tiananmen Square. 1963—Allen Ginsberg visits Saigon to assess the political situation. 1962—A failing Thor rocket is blown up over the South Pacific; the first U.S. …

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