OCTOBER 15th

On this date in:
1860	Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, N.Y., wrote a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, suggesting he could improve his appearance by growing a beard.
1945	The former premier of Vichy France, Pierre Laval, was executed.
1946	Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering fatally poisoned himself hours before he was to have been executed.
1951	The situation comedy "I Love Lucy" premiered on CBS.
1964	Composer Cole Porter died at age 73.
1966	President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill creating the Department of Transportation.
1969	Peace demonstrators staged activities across the country, including a candlelight march around the White House, as part of a moratorium against the Vietnam War.
1976	Democrat Walter F. Mondale and Republican Bob Dole faced off in the first debate between vice-presidential nominees.
1989	Wayne Gretzky of the Los Angeles Kings surpassed Gordie Howe's NHL career scoring record of 1,850 points.
1990	Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
1990	South Africa's Separate Amenities Act, which had barred blacks from public facilities for decades, was scrapped.
1991	The Senate narrowly confirmed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, 52-48.
1993	Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end apartheid in South Africa.
2002	ImClone Systems founder Sam Waksal pleaded guilty in New York in the biotech company's insider trading scandal. (He was later sentenced to more than seven years in prison.)
2003	China launched its first manned space mission.
2005	Iraqis voted to approve a constitution.

Article of the day...

Mata Hari executed

Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, is executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris.

She first came to Paris in 1905 and found fame as a performer of exotic Asian-inspired dances. She soon began touring all over Europe, telling the story of how she was born in a sacred Indian temple and taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari, meaning "eye of the day" in Malay. In reality, Mata Hari was born in a small town in northern Holland in 1876, and her real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She acquired her superficial knowledge of Indian and Javanese dances when she lived for several years in Malaysia with her former husband, who was a Scot in the Dutch colonial army. Regardless of her authenticity, she packed dance halls and opera houses from Russia to France, mostly because her show consisted of her slowly stripping nude.

She became a famous courtesan, and with the outbreak of World War I her catalog of lovers began to include high-ranking military officers of various nationalities. In February 1917, French authorities arrested her for espionage and imprisoned her at St. Lazare Prison in Paris. In a military trial conducted in July, she was accused of revealing details of the Allies' new weapon, the tank, resulting in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and on October 15 she refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a firing squad at Vincennes.

There is some evidence that Mata Hari acted as a German spy, and for a time as a double agent for the French, but the Germans had written her off as an ineffective agent whose pillow talk had produced little intelligence of value. Her military trial was riddled with bias and circumstantial evidence, and it is probable that French authorities trumped her up as "the greatest woman spy of the century" as a distraction for the huge losses the French army was suffering on the western front. Her only real crimes may have been an elaborate stage fallacy and a weakness for men in uniform.

source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=VideoArticle&id=7051




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