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Blair Peach

Blair Peach died on 24 April 1979 after an anti-racism demonstration in Southall, London, England. Peach, a New Zealand teacher and activist born in 1946, had taken part in an Anti-Nazi League demonstration against a National Front election meeting in Southall Town Hall. An investigation by Commander John Cass of the Metropolitan Police Service concluded that Peach had been fatally hit on the head by an officer of the service's Special Patrol Group, and that other officers had obstructed the investigation. Excerpts from a leaked copy of the report were published in early 1980. In 1988 the Metropolitan Police paid £75,000 compensation to Peach's family. The full report was not released to the public until 2009, after a newspaper vendor died from being struck from behind by a member of the Territorial Support Group, the Special Patrol Group's successor organisation. An award in Peach's honour was set up by the National Union of Teachers, and a school in Southall is named after him. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Celestial globe by Åkerman

... that Anders Åkerman started the production of terrestrial and celestial globes (example pictured) in Sweden?
... that the West Georgia Wolves football team won 13 games in 13 years before folding, but upon returning two decades later compiled consecutive undefeated regular seasons and became national champions?
... that Fūka Izumi became a voice actress despite initially doubting that she could be one?
... that seven countries competed in the Eurovision Song Contest 1994 for the first time, the largest single expansion of participating countries since the contest's first edition?
... that the young Turkish open water swimmer Aysu Türkoğlu has completed three of the Oceans Seven series?
... that the Indianapolis African-American community raised $100,000 in just ten days in 1911 to establish the Senate Avenue YMCA?
... that Edgar Wright's pitch for an Ant-Man film in 2006 helped to shape the early films of Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
... that while touring for her album Wallsocket, Underscores handed out pizza before her sets?
... that The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 has been the first, second, and third volume of the Oxford History of the United States?

In the news

Voyager 1

NASA announces that the Voyager 1 space probe (rendering shown) is sending readable data for the first time in five months.
Ichthyotitan, the largest known marine reptile, is formally described.
Flooding in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula leaves more than thirty people dead.
The historic Børsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, is severely damaged by a fire.
A knife attack in Sydney, Australia, leaves seven people dead.

On this day

April 24: Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (1915); Administrative Professionals Day in various countries (2024)

Hubble Space Telescope

1837 – A fire broke out in Surat, India, which went on to destroy about 75% of the city.
1916 – Irish republicans led by Patrick Pearse began the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland, and proclaimed the Irish Republic an independent state.
1990 – The Hubble Space Telescope (pictured) was launched aboard STS-31 by Space Shuttle Discovery.
1993 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a truck bomb in London's financial district in Bishopsgate, killing one person, injuring forty-four others, and causing damage that cost £350 million to repair.

Mellitus (d. 624)
Kumar Dharmasena (b. 1971)
Estée Lauder (d. 2004)

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Today's featured picture

Luis Walter Alvarez (1911–1988) was an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1940, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects and worked as a test pilot, before joining J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project in 1943. He moved back to Berkeley as a full professor after the war, going on to use his knowledge in work on improving particle accelerators. This 1969 photograph shows Alvarez with a magnetic monopole detector at Berkeley.

Photograph credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory / Department of Energy

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