< 24 Nov 26 Nov > ^ Deaths which occurred on a 25 November:



2006 Sean Bell [18 May 1983–], Black, shot at 04:15 (09:15 UT) by five detectives who shoot their 16-shot 9mm semiautomatics at the car driven by him, in which, with two friends (unarmed, like him), he is leaving his bachelor party at Kalua Cabaret, 143-08 94th Avenue in Jamaica, New York, after the car, having gone a half block east on 94th Avenue and turned south into Liverpool Street, collides twice with an unmarked police car. The detectives are Gescard F. Isnora, 28, Black, who fires the first shot and 10 more; Michael Oliver, 35, White, who fires 31 shots, Marc Cooper, Black, who fires 4 shots; Paul Headley, 35, who fires 1 shot; Michael Carey, 26, who fires 3 shots. Bell's friends Joseph Guzman, 31, and Trent Benefield, 23, are wounded, arrested, and chained to hospital beds. Bell was to marry at 17:00 his mate Nicole Paultre, 22, mother of their two daughters, Jordyn Paultre, 3, and Jada Paultre, 5 months. —(070319)

2003 Gail Knisley, 62, shot while being driven back to her home, 60 km from Colombus OH where she had just had skin cancer removed from her nose. The driver, her friend Mary Cox, is unhurt. This happens on an 8-km section of Interstate 270 on which, or near which vehicles have been reported being shot at once in May 2003, once in August 2003, and 8 times in October and November 2003, with no one hurt, and no worse effects than bullet holes or broken windows in the vehicles.

2003 Some 200 persons of the more than 400 aboard the shabby boat Dieu Merci and another open-topped vessel lashed alongside, which both break up and sink in a violent storm on lake Mai-Ndombe near Inongo, Congo (ex-Zaïre). There are 222 survivors. The manifest declared only 15 passengers, the boat had space for 150. The owner, Ntomba Nzondo, escaped in a canoe, taking with him one of the two outboard motors used to propel the vessel. He is arrested later. — Le Dieu Merci était une baleinière, embarcation longue et légère, affectée dans cette région au transport des passagers. — Another overloaded ferry sank in Lake Tanganyika in Congo's far east in March 2003, killing 111; 41 survived.

2003 Buraq Shaka, shot by gunmen firing at the car where he was with his brother Ghassan Shaka, mayor of Nablus, West Bank, and moderate member of the Palestinian parliament (who is not hurt). Buraq was a businessman residing in Jordan and was visiting his brother in Nablus.

2002 Jihad Faqeh, 8, Palestinian boy shot in the chest from more than 100 meters by Israeli soldiers in Nablus, West Bank, firing on a group of several dozen children who were ignoring the curfew on their way home from school, and some of whom (but not Jihad Faqeh) were throwing stones at their jeep. Seven Palestinians are wounded in various parts of Nablus by Israeli bullets and tank shells. According to Reuters, the al-Aqsa intifada body count reaches at least 1678 Palestinians and 662 Israelis.

2001 Johnny Michael "Mike" Spann, 32, some United Front fighters, and hundreds of Taliban fighters recently taken prisoners in Kunduz, Afghanistan, by US airstrikes and Northern Alliance (= United Front) troops, after the prisoners seize weapons from their guards, capture an ammunition depot, and take over the Qalai Janghi fortress where they were held. Fighting continues until 27 November. Spann was an agent of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, there to interrogate prisoners, and is the first US person killed in combat in this conflict.

2001 Lameck Chemvura, 22, university student, beaten, strangled with a shoelace, and then thrown out the window of a moving train by Zimbabwean soldiers, who accused passengers on the train bound for the eastern city of Mutare of supporting the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change. On 27 November, University of Zimbabwe's Harare students would riot over the killing.

2000 Tayser al-Araj, 13, Palestinian killed by Israeli gunfire at Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. With three other Palestinians killed this day in the West Bank, this totals some 250 Palestinians and 40 Israelis killed in the 2-month-old al-Aqsa intifadah. There have been thousands wounded, and much property damage: vehicles on both sides, and Palestinian homes and orchards bulldozed.

^ 1998 Kayla McKean, 6, beaten to death by her father Richard Adams, 24, in Orlando..

State documents show that child welfare workers missed several chances to intervene and perhaps save Kayla's life in the months before she was beaten to death by her father. The documents show that in one instance, welfare investigators withheld information that could have led to Kayla's removal from her father's home. They apparently failed to interview a doctor who said the girl's life was in ``imminent danger.'' And they didn't challenge her father's contention that bicycle accidents or the family dog caused her injuries.

Adams, 24, slammed Kayla against a wall and struck her with a paddle after she soiled her underwear. He buried her in a forest some 80 km.

In October 1998, a Child Welfare agency supervisor said in a report that Adams could benefit from parenting and anger-management classes. No one told Adams about the recommendation.

Lake County child welfare workers first investigated when Adams took Kayla to a hospital in May 1998. He had assumed custody of the girl weeks earlier after her mother, Adams' former girlfriend, entered a battered woman's shelter. Kayla had two black eyes and a broken nose and left hand. In the emergency room, Adams said Kayla had fallen off her bike. As is the policy when a child is taken with suspicious injuries to an emergency room, child welfare workers placed her in a foster home and asked for a hearing on whether she should be removed from Adams' home. But in a report to Judge Jerry Lockett, a child welfare investigator mentioned only Kayla's black eyes and swelling, not the other injuries, and recommended the girl stay with her father. The judge agreed.

In June 1998, Kayla was taken to a doctor for treatment of an eye injury and for bruises all over her body. Adams admitted he had hit Kayla with a paddle but denied bruising her. The doctor said Kayla was "in imminent danger'' while in her father's care. Apparently, no investigator interviewed the doctor.

The month before she was killed, child welfare workers investigated a bump on Kayla's head, a chin abrasion and black eyes. Adams told them the abrasion was from a fall in the bathtub and her swollen eyes were the result of the family's golden retriever stepping on her face while she slept. Investigators believed his story. 1987 Harold Washington, 65, first Black mayor of Chicago, dies.

1978: 275 persons in crash of American Airlines DC-10 on takeoff from Chicago

1974 U Thant, 65, UN Secretary-General (1961-72), in NY of cancer ^ 1970 Yukio Mishima , a prolific writer of Japanese novels, essays, poetry, and traditional plays, publicly commits a ritual suicide known as seppuku, in Tokyo, in an attempt to rouse Japan to its pre-war nationalist ideals. Mishima, born in Tokyo in 1925, published his first major work, Confessions of a Mask, in 1949. The novel dealt with the discovery of his homosexuality and his experience during Japan's war years. Educated in Western traditions, he increasingly became interested in the culture and customs of imperial Japan. Perhaps his greatest work was the four-part Sea of Fertility epic, written between 1965 and 1970, which spanned Japanese life and events in the twentieth century and explored the conflicts between traditional Japanese culture and post-war Westernization. During this time, Mishima, who had become an expert in traditional martial arts, formed the Tate no Kai, or "Shield Society," with approximately 100 students. The organization attempted to revive the traditional Samurai code of honor. In 1970, Mishima seized a government office, urged his followers to reject the new Japanese constitution and rearm the country's military, then committed sepukku, the ritual suicide of self-disembowelment with a sword also known as harikari, or "belly slitting." 1969: 115 Communist and 10 US soldiers as Communists step up attacks against US troops shielding Allied installations near the Cambodian border. 70. US forces have 70 wounded and lose more than a dozen tanks and tons of ammunition.

1967 Ossip Zadkine, French artist born on 14 July 1890. — more

1961 Maria, Teresa, and Minerva Mirabel, brutally murdered in the Dominican Republic. In 1999 the UN would chose this date as the International Day for the elimination of violence against women.

1958 Charles F Kettering, 82, invented auto self-starter.

1957 Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, Mexican Social Realist muralist born on 08 December 1886. — MORE ON RIVERA AT ART 4 NOVEMBER with links to images.

1952 Huntington, mathematician ^ 1944 Some 160 British shoppers, by Nazi V-2 rocket

A German V-2 missile hit a Woolworth's department store in New Cross Road, Deptford, killing 160 midday shoppers. The V-2 was a recent innovation in German ammunition. Its first operational launch had occurred only two months previously, on September 6, when two missiles were fired at Paris. Unlike its predecessor, the V-1 buzz bomb, the V-2 was invulnerable to antiaircraft guns and fighters. Upon launching, the forty-six-foot-long rocket-propelled missile rose vertically to an altitude of about six miles, then arced upward to about fifty miles. At its apex, the missile automatically cut off its own fuel, tipped over, and sailed downward toward its target at nearly 4,000 mph. The entire flight lasted no longer than four minutes and wielded an enormous explosive force. In the final months of the war, the German V-2 campaign against England killed 2,754 people and seriously injured 6,523 others. Deptford certainly was not spared in the bloody V-2 campaign. A thirteen-year-old girl named June Gaida recalled the horrifying experience of that day. "I remember seeing a horse's head in the gutter," she said. "Further on there was a pram all twisted and bent, and there was a little baby's hand still in its woolly sleeve. Outside the pub, there was a bus and it had been concertinaed, with rows of people sitting inside, all covered in dust—and dead." 1937 Padoa, mathematician.

1936 Édouard Goursat, mathematician.

1936 Jacinto Serrano L�pez O.P. [30 Jul 1901–], Provincial Vicar of the Dominican province of Aragón, is martyred by the 2d Sparish Republic. He would be beatified on 11 March 2001, as one of the martyrs “José Aparicio Sanz and his 232 companions”. —(090808)

1924 Jules Worms, French artist born on 16 December 1832.

1914 Some 90'000 Russians and 35'000 Germans in the last two weeks in Lodz offensive, which German Field Marshal Fredrich von Hindenburg now calls off 60 km from Warsaw.

1885 Thomas A Hendricks, 66, 21st US Vice-President, 8 months after taking office ^ 1876 Amerindian children, women, and men massacred by US Army in retaliation for Little Bighorn

During the so-called Great Sioux War, US troops under the leadership of General Ranald Mackenzie destroy the village of Cheyenne living with Chief Dull Knife, in the Bighorn Mountains near the Red Fork of the Powder River. The attack is in retaliation against some of the Indians who had participated in the victory over Custer and his men at Little Bighorn. Although the Sioux and Cheyenne won one of their greatest victories at Little Bighorn, the battle actually marked the beginning of the end of their ability to resist the US government. News of the "massacre" of Custer and his men reached the East Coast in the midst of nationwide centennial celebrations on July 4, 1876.

Outraged at the killing of one of their most popular Civil War heroes, many Americans demanded an intensified military campaign against the offending Indians. The government responded by sending one of its most successful Indian fighters to the region, General Ranald Mackenzie, who had previously been the scourge of Commanche and Kiowa Indians in Texas. Mackenzie led an expeditionary force up the Powder River in central Wyoming, where he located a village of Cheyenne living with Chief Dull Knife. Although Dull Knife himself does not appear to have been involved in the battle at Little Bighorn, there is no question that many of his people were, including one of his sons. At dawn, Mackenzie and over

1000 soldiers and 400 Indian scouts opened fire on the sleeping village, killing many Amerindian children, women, and men within the first few minutes. Some of the Cheyenne, though, managed to run into the surrounding hills. They watched as the soldiers burned more than 200 lodges — containing all their winter food and clothing — and then cut the throats of their ponies. When the soldiers found souvenirs taken by the Cheyenne from soldiers they had killed at Little Bighorn, the assailants felt justified in their attack.

The surviving Cheyenne, many of them half-naked, began an 11-day walk north to the Tongue River where Crazy Horse's camp of Oglalas took them in. However, many of the small children and old people did not survive the frigid journey. Devastated by his losses, the next spring Dull Knife convinced the remaining Cheyenne to surrender. The army sent them South to Indian Territory, where other defeated survivors of the final years of the Plains Indian wars soon joined them. 1867 Karl Ferdinand Sohn, German artist born on 10 December 1805. — more

1858 Johannes Reekers, Dutch artist born in 1790.

1790 Plusieurs propriétaires terriens de saint Domingue, massacrés par les esclaves qui se révoltent. Les mulâtres libres avaient décidé de défendre les armes à la main la reconnaissance des droits de citoyens que le décret du 8 mars précédent leur avait accordé, à tous sans distinction de couleur de peau.

1733 Quillard Pierre Antoine Quilliard, French artist born in 1701.

1694 Boulliau, mathematician.

