WTF Is It Now?!?

Cool stuff in Today in History:

1881: President James Garfield is shot by Charles Julius Guiteau, a man who had wanted to be Ambassador to France. It takes Garfield two months to die. Hmmmm.

1937: Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Pacific.

1947: A craft of 30 meter diameter crashes on the Foster Ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. By July 8, the U.S. Army had cleared the land and declared it off limits. An Army press conference asserts the debris to be that of a weather balloon, but that explanation does not mesh well with witness observations.

1998: The eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which has burned continuously since 1921 to commemorate the dead of World War I, is extinguished by a drunken soccer fan with his beer-enriched urine. Mexican national Rodrigo Rafael Ortega is subsequently arrested for public drunkenness and offending the dead.



And these are the polite Brits speaking...

'It took the Bush administration a good deal of internal negotiation to come up with its ringing endorsement of the Sharon line, but leading British civil servants I spoke to about last week's speech by Mr Bush regarded it as - I quote - "puerile", "absurdly ignorant" and "ludicrous'....There is, for instance, a rooted dislike of the "arrogance" - not my word, but that of a senior and much respected civil servant - that enables President Bush ("a bear of very little brain" - ditto) to announce to the Palestinians who should and shouldn't be their leader. And there is a parallel impatience at the "stupidity" (ditto) which will unquestionably ensure that Palestinians of all kinds will now feel obliged to support Yasser Arafat as their leader, for better or worse.' - John Simpson, in the London Telegraph.