This Day in History

Jan 13 1943
Hitler declares "Total War".


Jan 13 1959
Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, lines up 71 Batista supporters in front of a trench and machine guns them. They are then buried by a tractor without any verification that the prisoners were killed.

Jan 13 1962
Television comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs drives his "unsafe at any speed" Corvair into a utility pole on Santa Monica Boulevard, killing him instantly and turning The Nairobi Trio into a Duo.

Jan 13 1979
The Young Men's Christian Association files a libel suit against the Village People for their popular Y.M.C.A hit.

Jan 13 1982
Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River, killing all but four passengers and one flight attendant.

The aircraft was carrying 74 passengers and five crewmembers when it crashed during the failed takeoff attempt. The aircraft struck the 14th Street Bridge, which carries Interstate 395 between Washington, D.C. and Arlington County. It crushed seven occupied vehicles on the bridge and destroyed 97 feet of guard rail before it plunged through the ice into the Potomac River. The crash occurred less than two miles from the White House and within view of both the Jefferson Memorial and The Pentagon.

The accident killed 78 people, including four motorists on the 14th Street Bridge. The survivors were rescued from the icy river by civilians and professionals.

Jan 13 1987
New York mobsters Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Carmine "Junior" Persico sentenced to 100 years of prison for racketeering, along with six others. All were members of the Mafia "board of directors"

Jan 13 1991
Forty-two people are killed in a soccer stampede and melee at Johannesburg, South Africa.

Jan 13 1998
A woman taking a tour of the White House applies spray paint to two early 19th century marble busts modeled by Giuseppi Ceracchi. No clear motive exists for the vandalism, and it it not clear how spray paint was brought through White House security. Spokesman Mike McCurry stated, "it looks like a bad rouge job on the busts".

This Day In History

Dec 21 1970
President Nixon meets with prescription drug addict Elvis Presley at the White House to discuss The King's becoming a special drug enforcement agent. He presents Nixon with a pistol, and receives a special DEA badge in return.

Dec 21 1978
John Wayne Gacy arrested in Des Plaines, IL after remains of some of the 33 men and boys he had killed are discovered on his land.

Dec 21 1988
Pan Am flight 103 detonates over Lockerbie Scotland, by means of a remote control radio bomb. All 259 aboard are killed as well as 11 on the ground struck by falling detritus. The PFLP faction of the PLO was responsible, assisted by Libyan sponsorship.

Dec 21 2012
The Mayan "long count" calendar is based on great cycles of 5125 years, the current cycle ending on this day in 2012. Endings of cycles are punctuated by cataclysmic singularities on a deluge scale, so be prepared. This is the end of time!

This Day In History

Sep 12 1992
Anthony Perkins, star of the Hitchcock classic Psycho, dies of AIDS in his Hollywood hills home. His extraordinary versatility as an actor is captured in the films Psycho II, Psycho III, and Psycho IV: The New Beginning.

Sep 12 1994
After a night of boozing and smoking crack, Frank Corder steals a Cessna P150 and crashes it into the south lawn of the White House. The wreckage tumbles over a tree and a hedge before coming to rest against the West Wing of the Executive Mansion. Corder's flamboyant suicide attack never actually imperiled President Clinton's life, since the First Family was sleeping elsewhere at the time.

This Day In History

Sep 3 1969
Ho Chi Minh dies of heart failure in Hanoi, Vietnam. He had asked to be cremated and his ashes buried on three hilltops. Contrary to his express wishes, Uncle Ho is embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum just like Lenin's.

Sep 3 1971
The office of Daniel Ellsberg's Beverly Hills psychiatrist is burglarized by Nixon's plumbers, led by CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. Watergate investigators later uncover a memo about the burglary addressed to White House domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman, predating the actual crime.

This Day In History

Aug 24 1812
The White House and other public buildings in the District of Columbia are torched by the British.

Aug 24 1981
Mark David Chapman sentenced to 20 years for killing Beatle John Lennon.

White House Plans To Release Plane Flyover Report & Photo

(CNN) -- The White House indicated Wednesday that a report and a photo from the controversial low-altitude New York flyover by a 747 plane used as Air Force One could be released soon.

Earlier, White House officials had said that there were no plans to release photos to the public.

But the tone seemed to change on Wednesday.

"The report, I believe, will be concluded at some point this week. We'll release its findings and release a photo," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during his daily press briefing.

The review, led by Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, will focus on "why that decision was made and to ensure that it never happens again," Gibbs said.

The flyover, officials said, was a training mission -- it was also a government-sanctioned photo shoot.

Military officials also estimate that the mission and the photo shoot, aimed at updating file photos of Air Force One -- cost $328,835 in taxpayer money.

But they said "the hours would have been flown regardless, and the expenses would have been accrued on a different mission."

The photo shoot, which President Obama said he was "furious" with, happened on April 27. The image of a low-flying plane accompanied by an F-16 fighter jet sent some New Yorkers into the streets and into a panic -- reminding them of the tragic 9/11 attacks on the city.

Building evacuations also took place across the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey. Read more of Obama's reaction

White House Military Office Director Louis Caldera later apologized for the flyover.

Witnesses reported seeing the plane circle over the Upper New York Bay near the Statue of Liberty before flying up the Hudson River.

A YouTube video showed people standing in a parking lot, watching the plane approach. As it nears, they begin to run. "Run, run!" said one person. "Oh my God," cried another.

A 911 call, released later by the Hudson County Sheriff's Department in New Jersey, illustrated the fear and panic felt by residents since the 9/11 attacks.

"There's a plane falling. There is a big aircraft falling like 9/11," a man says to the operator. "Everybody is running and people are crying and panicking."

CNN iReporter Tom Kruk, who saw the plane and took a photo, called the sight of the aircraft low in the sky "unsettling."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was visibly angry last week. "I'm annoyed -- furious is a better word -- that I wasn't told," he said, adding that the decision by the White House Military Office and Federal Aviation Administration to withhold details about the flight were "ridiculous" and "poor judgment."

But according to Air Force Capt. Anna Carpenter, local law enforcement agencies and the FAA had been notified of the exercise.

New York Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne confirmed that department had been alerted about the flight "with directives to local authorities not to disclose information about it."

That decision riled local media.

"Given that we are not big on reminders of 9/11, we could have done without the whole thing. But the FAA outdunced itself by asking the NYPD to keep the photo op a secret, as if no one would look up and say, 'What the hell?' " the New York Daily News said on April 28.

The New York Post, in its editorial on the same day, said: "The FAA had long preferred to keep passengers ignorant of these dangers. Better to have people panic, it seems, at the sudden sight of low-flying aircraft over Lower Manhattan. ... Someone needs to straighten out these folks -- quick."

The controversy had some questioning President Obama's declaration of a new era of openness, who on January 21, said: "The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over."

So why, exactly, didn't that initially apply to the photos? An advocate for government disclosure said it should, and that it's "silly" and "absurd" to withhold them.

"These are public records because they were done on government time, with government resources, and government personnel," said Patrice McDermott of openthegovernment.org.

In New York, news that the photos might not be released reignited public outrage over the incident.

It doesn't seem right," said Kurt Wallin from New Jersey. "If we spent the money to have these photos taken, they should be available for the public to see."

Emily Ritter from Park City, Utah, added: "I feel like maybe they're covering it up because it's been seen in a bad light already ... maybe they are still worried about their image and don't want to be seen in a bad light."

White House joins Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

"Awesome, totally awesome!"
The official White House Blog calls it "WhiteHouse 2.0." The administration is unveiling its membership in a trio of the social-networking leaders today: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. How do the accounts look shortly after launch?

The Facebook page already has more than 38,000 fans, and the number appears to jump another thousand every few minutes at this hour. The MySpace page is a highly stylized version of designs typically seen on the service, with 5,300 friends and counting. "A quick glance at the profiles shows that they mostly just link to or copy entries on the existing WhiteHouse.gov blog, but they welcome comments and are quickly gathering thousands of fans," PaidContent.org says.


TechCrunch offers initial analysis of the MySpace page: "There are no ads on the page, but if you click through to photos page, then you do get some ads. The add beside this photo of the president running down a hallway with his daughter's puppy has an ad that says, 'Pimp My Profile.' Not very Presidential. On Facebook, there is an ad slot on the actual page, but I only saw a house ad for Facebook's gift shop with a penguin. ... The Facebook page basically has the same information, but presented as a stream. Which one do you like better?"

The @whitehouse Twitter feed so far has more than 10,000 followers and retweeted a swine-flu alert from the CDC. Information about the H1N1 virus is the most common theme across the White House's uses of the services today.

"Hopefully, these pages will follow the same pattern as the administration's other web efforts -- they start out underwhelming, but improve eventually," Venture Beat writes. The blog's underwhelmed headline is "Meet White House 2.0, same as White House 1.0 (but on Twitter!)"