Jeremy Thorpe (29 April 1929 – 4 December 2014) was a British
politician who served as Member of Parliament for North Devon from 1959
to 1979, and as leader of the Liberal Party between 1967 and 1976. After
graduating from Oxford University, he became one of the Liberals'
brightest stars in the 1950s. As party leader, Thorpe capitalised on the
growing unpopularity of the Conservative and Labour parties to lead the
Liberals through a period of electoral success. This culminated in the
general election of February 1974, when the party won 6 million votes.
In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and
incitement to murder, arising from an earlier relationship with Norman
Scott, a former model. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the
case, and the scandal, ended his political career. By the time of his
death he was honoured for his record as an internationalist, a supporter
of human rights, and an opponent of apartheid and all forms of racism.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Thorpe>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1903:
A 30 million cubic-metre landslide buried the town of Frank,
Northwest Territories, and killed at least 70 of the town's residents,
making it the deadliest landslide in Canadian history.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Slide>
1945:
The Holocaust: The Seventh U.S. Army liberated Dachau, the
first Nazi concentration camp, and allegedly wounded and killed German
prisoners of war.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_liberation_reprisals>
1975:
Vietnam War: North Vietnam concluded its East Sea Campaign by
capturing all of the Spratly Islands that were being held by South
Vietnam.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Sea_Campaign>
2011:
A worldwide television audience of 300 million people watched
the wedding of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine Middleton
at Westminster Abbey in London.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_of_Prince_William_and_Catherine_Middleton>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
curate's egg:
(idiomatic) A thing which has good and bad parts, but is overall spoilt
by the bad.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curate%27s_egg>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The principal aim of mathematical education is to develop certain
faculties of the mind, and among these intuition is not the least
precious. It is through it that the mathematical world remains in touch
with the real world, and even if pure mathematics could do without it,
we should still have to have recourse to it to fill up the gulf that
separates the symbol from reality.
--Henri Poincaré
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9>