Pateira

From  Commander Neil Amstrong, to Earth's Apollo 11 Mission Control :

"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

The Apollo 11 mission was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. It was the fifth human spaceflight of the Apollo program and the third human voyage to the moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Commander Neil Alden Amstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Egene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr.

On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon, while Collins orbited above.

At 2:56 UTC,  July 21, Armstrong made his descent to the Moon's surface and spoke his famous line:

"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind"

exactly six and a half hours after landing, Aldrin joined him, saying, "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation". Then for two-and-a-half hours, they took notes, photographed what they saw, and drilled cores samples (22 Kg). On July 24, the 3 astronauts returned home, planet Earth.  Simple as that!

On 28 April 1969,  Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (1890 - 1970) steps down as president of France after the defeat of a referendum to transform the Senate into an advisory body while giving extended powers to regional councils. Some said this referendum was a self-conscious political suicide committed by de Gaulle after the traumatising events of May 1968.

Chales de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces from his London exile during World War II.  On 13th November, 1945, the first Constituent Assembly unanimously elected de Gaulle as head of the French government. He held the post until resigning on 20th January, 1946.  He returned to politics in 1958 when he was elected president during the Algerian crisis and founded on 28 September 1958 the French Fifth Republic and served as its first President.

De Gaulle decided that France should have its own atom bomb and repeatedly blocked Britain's attempts to join the European Economic Commnunity.  In 1966 de Gaulle withdrew France from the integrated military command of NATO.

In Cairo, on February 4, 1969, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (1929 - 2004), popularly known as Yasser Arafat, is appointed Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.  He was leader of the secular Fatah political party, which he founded in 1959.

Originally opposed to Israel's existence, he modified his position in 1988 when he accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242.

The PLO was founded by the Arab League in May 1964, under the chairmanship of Ahmad Shuqeiri, a Palestinian with long experience as an Arab diplomat. The original PLO Charter declared the establishment of Israel "illegal, null and void" and outlined goals to "liberate the homeland" via armed struggle.  Palestinian statehood was not mentioned, although in 1974 the PLO adopted the idea of an independent state between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. More recently, the PLO officially adopted a two-state solution, with Israel and Palestine living side by side contingent on specific terms such as making East Jerusalem capital of the Palestinian state and giving Palestinians right of return.

Robert Kennedy, brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, was killed on June 5, after winning the Democratic primary for the Presidency in California. Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.  Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, opened fire with a .22 caliber revolver and shot Kennedy in the head at close range. Following the shooting, Kennedy was rushed to The Good Samaritan Hospital where he died the next day.

He served as United States Attorney General from 1961 to 1964 and a US Senator from New York from 1965 until his assassination. He was one of President Kennedy's most trusted advisors and worked closely with the president during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His contribution to the African-AMerican Civil Rights Movement is sometimes considered his greatest legacy.

His younger brother, Senator Ted Kennedy concluded his eulogy, quoting George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"

In August 1968 at 79, the dictador António Salazar suddenly suffered a stroke after falling from a chair, and after 36 years as prime minister he was removed from power. President Admiral Américo Tomás, after weighing a number of choices, appointed Marcelo Caetano to replace Salazar on September, 27, 1968.

Most of the people hoped that the new prime minister would soften the authoritarian regime and modernize the economy. Caetano moved on to foster economic growth and some social improvement. The economy reacted very well at first, but into the 70's some serious problems began to show, due in part to two-digit inflation and to the effects of the 1973 oil crisis.  But the war in Africa was consuming as much as 40% of the Portuguese budget and there was no sign of a solution in sight. At a military level, most of Guinea-Bissau was de facto independent since 1973. In Angola and Mozambique, independence movements controlled at most some remote areas.

On April 25, 1974, the military overthrew the regime in the "Carnation Revolution". There was almost no resistance. Caetano resigned, and was flown under custody to the Madeira Islands where he stayed for a few days. He then flew to exile in Brazil, where he died in Rio de Janeiro of a heart attack in 1980.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968, for the purpose of choosing the Democratic nominee for the 1968 U.S. presidential election, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund S. Muskie.

Over the year, protests groups had been promising to come to Chicago and disrupt the convention, and the City promised to maintain law and order. For eight days, protesters and police battled for control of the streets of Chicago, while inside the convention the Old Guard of the Democratic Party reigned supreme in all matters. Given the atmosphere in the International Amphitheatre, nobody would not think it possible that a major conflict between police and protesters was taking place just a few miles away. That confrontation in the streets, however, would have a greater impact than the seating of racially mixed delegates from southern states, credential and platform battles, and even the presidential nomination. It was the violence in the street that held America’s attention during the last week of August 1968, not the convention itself.

On April 1968, Jim Clark's life tragically ended in a crash in a Formula Two race for Lotus at the Hockenheimring in Germany. On the fourth lap, his Lotus veered off the track and crashed into the trees. He suffered a broken neck and skull fracture, and died before reaching the hospital. The cause of the crash was never definitively identified, but investigators concluded it was most likely due to a deflating rear tyre.

Jim (or Jimmy) Clark (1936 - 1968) was a Scotish Formula One racing driver.

He was the dominant driver of his era, winning two World Championships, in 1963 and 1965. At the time of his death, he had won more Grand Prix races (25) and more pole positions (33) than any driver up to that time. He also competed in the Indianapolis 500 five times, and won it once, in 1965.   As a sign of respect, Colin Chapman, Lotus manager, ordered the traditional green and yellow badge found on the nose of all Lotus road cars to be replaced with a black badge for a month following Clark's death

António de Oliveira Salazar, (April 28, 1889 - July 27, 1970) served as the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He founded and led the Estado Novo ("New State"), the authoritarian, right-wing government that presided over and controlled Portugal's social, economic, cultural and political life from 1933 to 1968.

In August 1968, Salazar suffered a major stroke, caused by his falling from a chair in his summer house.   It is believed that to his dying day Salazar thought that he was still Prime Minister of Portugal, but some of his aides claim that he was aware of the situation and just played along. He died in Lisbon. 

He was buried according to his wishes in his native soil, next to his ancestors and the modest farmers of the region, in a plain ordinary grave.  After Salazar's death, his Estado Novo regime persisted until a military coup in April 1974.

May 1968 is the name given to a series of student protests and a general strike that caused the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, but the established lwftist political institutions and labor unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the "old society" and traditional morality, focusing especially on the education system and employment.

is the name given to a series of student protests and a general strike that caused the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, but the established lwftist political institutions and labor unions distanced themselves from the movement. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the "old society" and traditional morality, focusing especially on the education system and employment.

By August the smoke of May in Paris had cleared. There had been pitched battles between thousands of students and riot police, followed by a five-week occupation of the Sorbonne and a general strike. May '68 was a political failure for the protestors, but it had an enormous social impact. In France, it is considered to be the watershed moment that saw the replacement of conservative morality (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) with the liberal morality (equality, sexual liberation, human rights) that dominates French society today.

The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens of South Vietnam, mostly civilians and majority of them women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968. Before being killed some of the victims were raped and sexually molested, beaten, tortured, or maimed. Some of the dead bodies were also mutilated. The massacre took place in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe villages during the Vietnam War.

My Lai village had about 700 residents.  They lived in either red-brick homes or thatch-covered huts.  A  deep drainage ditch marked the eastern boundary of the village.  Directly south of the residential area was an open  plaza area used for holding village meetings.  The cover-up of the My Lai massacre began almost as soon as the killing ended.  Official army reports of the operation proclaimed a great victory: 128 enemy dead, only one American casualty (one soldier intentionally shot himself in the foot). In November, 1969, the American public began to learn the details of what happened at My Lai 4.  The massacre was the cover story in both Time and Newsweek.

The original theatre where this transplant was performed has been turned into a museum in honour of these pioneers of medicine, and to the first donor and recipient. Professor Christiaan Barnard passed away in Cyprus, Greece on 2 September 2001 from an acute asthma attack.

It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that Eddie Adams ( American photographer, 1933 - 2994) took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Veitcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lém, on a Saigon street, on February 1, 1968, during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive.

Adams won a World Press Photo award for the photograph, but would later lament its notoriety. On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in Time:

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera."

In 1968, Alexander Dubcek became First Secretary of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. Dubcek instituted a new program, what he called "Communism with a Human Approach." Dubcek's reforms included freedom of speech and of the press. The period became known as the "Prague Spring."

But the period ended when Warsaw Pact troops invaded on the night of the 20-21 August 1968. More than 100 people were killed, and the Communist leaders, including Alexander Dubcek, were arrested and taken to Moscow.

Vaclav Havel said the Prague Spring was "a beautiful time because after 20 years it was possible to breathe and speak freely."  But the former dissident - who led the 1989 peaceful overthrow of the Communist government and was a young playwright in 1968 - also said the Prague Spring was a conflict between two groups of Communists, and "revealed the totalitarian nature of that system."

April 24, 1965: The bodies of Portuguese opposition politician Humberto Delgado - born in 1906 - and his secretary Arajaryr Moreira de Campos were found in a forest near Villanueva del Fresno, Spain.  Delgado and his Brazilian secretary were murdered on 13 February, 1965, after being attracted to an ambush by the regime's secret police (PIDE) near the border town of Olivença, when trying to enter Portugal clandestinely. The official version was that he was killed in self defense, but he was not even armed when he was shot, and his secretary was strangled.

In 1990, Humberto Delgado was posthumously promoted to Marshal of the Portuguese Air Force - being the only person to hold this rank.  Although initially a supporter of the right-wing dictatorship Salazar, and the youngest general in Portuguese history, he run as a candidate to the Portuguese presidency in 1958, against the regime's candidate Américo Tomás loosing by fraud;  later, he was expelled from the Portuguese military, and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy before going into exile.

At 5:27 p.m., November 9, 1965, the entire Northeast area of the United States and large parts of Canada went dark. From Buffalo to the eastern border of New Hampshire and from New York City to Ontario, a massive power outage struck without warning, leaving 30 million people in the dark.

New York City was particularly hit by this blackout, due to its reliance on electricity for nearly all aspects of city life. Office workers were forced to find alternative lodging, some seeking shelter in their offices or on benches in Grand Central Station. Theaters closed for the night. The "Great White Way," Times Square, usually a glimmering crossroads of light, was covered in darkness. Thousands of travelers stranded in New York were forced to sleep in hotel lobbies, leading the Times to report that the "city's hotels looked like biovac areas." Approximately ten thousand commuters were stuck on subway cars, unable to escape the darkened tunnels. By midnight, the Transit Authority began sending food and coffee to those trapped underground.

Despite the confusion and disarray, New Yorkers spent the night in peace. There were no riots or widespread looting. Instead, New Yorkers helped each other.