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Grand Hotel Brighton on the morning after the bombing

On 12 October 1984 an assassination attempt was made by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on members of the British government, including the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Five people were killed and more than thirty injured; Thatcher was unharmed. The bombing was a key moment in the Troubles, the conflict in Northern Ireland between unionists and republicans, which took place in the late 20th century. The IRA decided to assassinate Thatcher during the 1981 hunger strike. Three weeks before the conference, the IRA member Patrick Magee planted a long-delay time bomb in the Grand Brighton Hotel, which the IRA knew would be occupied by Thatcher. The explosion dislodged a hotel chimney stack, which crashed through several floors (damage pictured). Thatcher decided to continue the conference as normal, which reopened six and a half hours after the explosion. A partial palm print was found on Magee's room registration card and after an eight-month investigation he was sent to prison for eight life sentences. (Full article...)

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Actinote zikani

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... that Arekia Bennett was inspired to organize a voter registration drive in 2017 by the 1964 Freedom Summer drive?
... that the Counterintelligence Group was disbanded because the unit was deemed successful in the "neutralization and prosecution of scalawags" in the Armed Forces of the Philippines?
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In the news

Han Kang

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang (pictured).
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is divided, with half awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their work on protein structure prediction and the other half to David Baker for his work on computational protein design.
Hurricane Milton makes landfall in the U.S. state of Florida.
John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research in machine learning with artificial neural networks.

On this day

October 12

Emerson iron lung

1799 – Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin became the first woman to make a parachute descent, falling 900 metres (3,000 ft) in the gondola of a hot air balloon.
1890 – The Uddevalla Suffrage Association was founded in Uddevalla, Sweden, with the purpose of bringing about universal suffrage.
1928 – The iron lung (example pictured), a type of medical ventilator, was used for the first time at the Boston Children's Hospital to treat an eight-year-old girl paralyzed by polio.
1933 – The United States Department of Justice acquired a military prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, to be transformed into the last-resort Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
2013 – Twelve people were killed in an apartment-building collapse in Medellín, leading to new construction laws being passed in Colombia.

Demosthenes (d. 322 BC)
Aleister Crowley (b. 1875)
Muhammad Shamsul Huq (b. 1912)
Emily Hale (d. 1969)

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Today's featured picture

Europa Clipper is a space probe developed by NASA and scheduled for launch in October 2024. The largest spacecraft NASA has built for a planetary mission, Europa Clipper is designed to study Jupiter's moon Europa through a series of flybys while in orbit around Jupiter, with the goals of exploring Europa, investigating its habitability, and aiding in the selection of a landing site for the future Europa Lander. It is expected to reach its destination in 2030. This photograph shows a commemorative plate, 7 by 11 inches (18 by 28 centimeters) in size and made of tantalum, that is attached to the outside of the space probe to seal an entrance to a vault designed to protect the electronics from Jupiter's radiation. The outer face of the plate, pictured here, is etched with waveforms of audio recordings of the word water translated into 103 languages, radiating outwards from the American Sign Language symbol for the same word. The inner face of the plate features a work by the American poet Ada Limón.

Photograph credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech; photographed by Ryan Lannom

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