state of Hawaii. Its original area of 334 acres (135 ha) was increased
during the 1930s to 441 acres (178 ha) with fill dirt after the U.S.
Navy dredged Pearl Harbor to make it safe for battleships. The island
was the site of an ancient Hawaiian fertility ritual, which was stopped
by Christian missionaries during the 1830s. It was given by
Kamehameha I to Spanish deserter Francisco de Paula Marín, and was
later owned by Seth Porter Ford. In 1916 the U.S. Army bought part of it
for use by an aviation division, and by 1939 it was taken over by the
U.S. Navy, for whom it was a strategic center of operations in the
Pacific Ocean. Ford Island was at the center of the attacks on Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was designated a National Historic
Landmark in 1964. By the late 1990s hundreds of millions of dollars had
been invested in real-estate development and infrastructure. Ford Island
is home to the USS Arizona memorial, the USS Missouri museum, the
Pacific Warfighting Center, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The
island has been featured in films such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl
Harbor.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Island>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
43 BC:
Cicero, widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and
prose stylists, was killed after having been proscribed as an enemy of
the state.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero>
1815:
Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was executed by a firing squad
near Paris' Jardin du Luxembourg for supporting Napoleon.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Ney>
1972:
The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft took the photograph "The
Blue Marble" (pictured), the first clear image of an illuminated face of
Earth, on their way to the Moon.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble>
1999:
The Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit
against the peer-to-peer file sharing network Napster, alleging the
service facilitated widespread copyright infringement.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster>
2007:
A crane barge that had broken free from a tugboat crashed into
an oil tanker near Daesan, South Korea, causing the country's worst-ever
oil spill.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_South_Korea_oil_spill>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
blunderbuss:
An old style of muzzleloading firearm and early form of shotgun with a
distinctive short, large caliber barrel that is flared at the muzzle,
therefore able to fire scattered quantities of nails, stones, shot, etc.
at short range: Timothy was excited to find a toy blunderbuss waiting
under the Christmas tree.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blunderbuss>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes
illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are
anarchists. What they call themselves doesn't matter to me. … This
world is full of suffering, distress, violence and catastrophes.
Students must decide: does something concern you or not? I say: look
around, analyze the problems, ask yourself what you can do and set out
on the work!
--Noam Chomsky
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky>
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