ON THIS DAY NOVEMBER 23

ON THIS DAY NOVEMBER 23

(SUBS/NEDS: FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY — NOT FOR BROADCAST/PUBLICATION)

HISTORIC, COMMEMORATIVE, AND INTERESTING EVENTS

534 BC – Thespis of Icaria becomes the first recorded actor to portray a character on stage.

1174 – Saladin enters Damascus, and adds it to his domain.

1248 – Conquest of Seville by Christian troops under King Ferdinand III of Castile.

1644 – John Milton publishes Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.

1733 – The start of the 1733 slave insurrection on St John in what was then the Danish West Indies.

1910 – Johan Alfred Ander becomes the last person to be executed in Sweden.

1924 – Edwin Hubble’s discovery, that the Andromeda “nebula” is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way is first published in The New York Times.

1934 – An Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission in the Ogaden discovers an Italian garrison at Walwal, well within Ethiopian territory. This leads to the Abyssinia Crisis.

1963 – The BBC broadcasts An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first episode of the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world’s longest running science fiction drama.

1971 – Representatives of the People’s Republic of China attend the United Nations, including the United Nations Security Council, for the first time.

1974 – Sixty Ethiopian politicians, aristocrats, military officers, and other persons are executed by the provisional military government.

1976 – Apneist Jacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100 m undersea without breathing equipment.

1978 – Cyclone kills about 1000 people in eastern Sri Lanka.

1980 – The 6.9 Mw  Irpinia earthquake shakes southern Italy with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing 2,483–4,900, and injuring 7,700–8,934.

1981 – Iran–Contra affair: Ronald Reagan signs the top secret National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), giving the Central Intelligence Agency the authority to recruit and support Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

1985 – Gunmen hijack EgyptAir Flight 648 en route from Athens to Cairo. When the plane lands in Malta, Egyptian commandos storm the aircraft, but 60 people die in the raid.

1992 – The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

1993 – Rachel Whiteread wins both the £20,000 Turner Prize award for best British modern artist and the £40,000 K Foundation art award for the worst artist of the year.

1996 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 is hijacked, then crashes into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros after running out of fuel, killing 125.

2001 – The Convention on Cybercrime is signed in Budapest, Hungary.

2003 – Rose Revolution: Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze resigns following weeks of mass protests over flawed elections.

2005 – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected president of Liberia and becomes the first woman to lead an African country.

2006 – A series of bombings kills at least 215 people and injures 257 others in Sadr City, making it the second deadliest sectarian attack since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003.

2007 – MS Explorer, a cruise liner carrying 154 people, sinks in the Antarctic Ocean south of Argentina after hitting an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands. There are no fatalities.

2011 – Arab Spring: After 11 months of protests in Yemen, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh signs a deal to transfer power to the vice president, in exchange for legal immunity.

2015 – Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle became the first rocket to successfully fly to space and then return to Earth for a controlled, vertical landing.

BIRTHS: Jean Baptiste Senaillé, French violinist and composer (1687), Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Dutch physicist and thermodynamicist, Nobel Prize laureate (1837), Henry Bourne Joy, American businessman (1864), Valdemar Poulsen, Danish engineer (1869), Boris Karloff, English actor (1887), Bennie Osler, South African rugby player (1901), Anne Burns, British aeronautical engineer and glider pilot (1915), Susan Anspach, American actress (1942), Merv Hughes, Australian cricketer (1961), Gary Kirsten, South African cricketer and coach (1967), Miley Cyrus, American singer-songwriter and actress (1992).

DEATHS: Thomas Tallis, English composer (1585), Thomas Henry Ismay, English businessman, founded White Star Line (1899), Hawley Harvey Crippen, American physician and murderer (1910), Roald Dahl, British novelist, poet, and screenwriter (1990), Mohamed Amin, Kenyan photographer and journalist (1996), Roberto Matta, Chilean-Italian painter and sculptor (2002), Larry Hagman, American actor, director, and producer (2012).

– African News Agency (ANA)