The Tottenham outrage of 23 January 1909 was a theft of wages from the
Schnurmann rubber factory in Tottenham, North London, followed by a two-
hour, six-mile (10 km) police chase. The armed robbers, Paul Helfeld
and Jacob Lepidus, killed themselves at the end of the pursuit. The
bravery of the police led to the creation of the King's Police Medal,
awarded to several of those involved in the pursuit. A joint funeral for
the two shooting victims—Police Constable William Tyler and Ralph
Joscelyne, a ten-year-old boy—was attended by a crowd of up to half a
million mourners, including 2,000 policemen. The deaths exacerbated ill
feelings towards immigrants in London, and much of the press coverage
was anti-Semitic in nature; Helfeld and Lepidus were Jewish Latvian
Socialists. Public sentiment was further inflamed the following year
after another criminal act by Latvian immigrants, culminating in the
Siege of Sidney Street, in which three policemen were murdered.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham_outrage>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1565:
The Deccan sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire at the
Battle of Talikota in present-day Karnataka, ending the last great Hindu
kingdom in South India.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talikota>
1793:
The Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia partitioned the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for the second time.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Partition_of_Poland>
1957:
American inventor Fred Morrison sold the rights to his "flying
disc" to the Wham-O toy company, who later renamed it the "Frisbee"
(example pictured).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisbee>
2001:
Five people attempted to set themselves on fire in Beijing's
Tiananmen Square, an act that many people later claimed was staged by
the Communist Party of China to frame Falun Gong and thus escalate their
persecution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_self-immolation_incident>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
gigot:
1. A leg of lamb or mutton.
2. (fashion) Short for gigot sleeve (“a type of sleeve shaped like a leg
of mutton”).
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gigot>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
We are finite creatures. Our lives are small and can only
scientifically consider a small part of reality. What's common for us is
just a sliver of what's available. We can only see so much of the
electromagnetic spectrum. We can only delve so deep into extensions of
space. Common sense applies to that which we can access. But common
sense is just that. Common. If total sense is what we want, we should be
prepared to accept that we shouldn't call infinity weird or strange. The
results we've arrived at by accepting it are valid, true within the
system we use to understand, measure, predict and order the universe.
Perhaps the system still needs perfecting, but at the end of day,
history continues to show us that the universe isn't strange. We are.
--Michael Stevens
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Stevens_%28educator%29>