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Benjamin Jackson (January 2, 1835 – August 20, 1915) was a Canadian sailor and farmer who was a decorated veteran of the American Civil War. He began his career as a commercial seaman at the age of 16 and started a farm in his mid-twenties. During the American Civil War, he served for a year in the Union Navy and was deployed in the Union blockade of the Confederate coastline. As a gun captain aboard USS Richmond, Jackson served in the Battle of Mobile Bay. He disarmed multiple naval mines and once picked up a live shell and threw it from the deck of the Richmond. Jackson likely earned an enlistment bounty, as well as prize money by capturing multiple blockade runners. He developed bronchitis, suffered a serious hand injury, and eventually received a Civil War Campaign Medal. After the war, he lived the rest of his life in Lockhartville, Nova Scotia. He retired from commercial sailing in 1875 but continued managing his farm. Jackson's grave remained unmarked until 2010, when a headstone was erected. (Full article...)

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Selected anniversaries

January 2: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Basil of Caesarea (Roman Rite Catholicism, Anglicanism)

A. Mitchell Palmer

1865 – Uruguayan War: Brazilian and Colorado Party forces captured the city of Paysandú from its Uruguayan defenders.
1920 – Under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (pictured), U.S. Department of Justice agents launched a series of raids against radical leftists and anarchists in more than 30 cities and towns across 23 states.
1991 – Sharon Pratt Dixon was sworn in as the mayor of Washington, D.C., becoming the first African-American woman to hold the position.
2004 – The Stardust space probe flew by the comet Wild 2 and collected particle samples from its coma, which were later returned to Earth.
2016 – Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia, was executed by the Saudi government along with 46 other people.

Salima Sultan Begum (d. 1613)
Queen Emma of Hawaii (b. 1836)
Mily Balakirev (b. 1837)
Edgar Martínez (b. 1963)

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In the news

Jimmy Carter

In New Orleans, an attacker rams a truck into a crowd and opens fire, killing at least 14 people and injuring dozens of others.
Former president of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter (pictured) dies at the age of 100.
Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashes at Muan International Airport, South Korea, killing 179 people.
Acting president and prime minister of South Korea Han Duck-soo is impeached by the National Assembly.

Did you know...

Orbits of some fictional planets of the Solar System

... that fictional planets of the Solar System (diagram pictured) include planets between Venus and Earth, planets on the inside of a hollow Earth, and a planet "behind the Earth"?
... that Sonya Friedman developed the idea of supertitles, which translate words being sung on stage in opera?
... that multiple scenes in Papa feature cotton-tree flowers, even though it was not scripted and the falling cotton simply kept drifting into the shot?
... that Canadian rapper Apt Exact, who has been described as "not gangster", was elected to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in 2024?
... that the Canaanite ivory comb contains the earliest known sentence in a Canaanite language?
... that schools in Wales during the Second World War were held in village halls?
... that Kathryn Maple won the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition twice in three years?
... that the apartment building the Manhasset caught fire in 1999, just as its renovation was being completed?
... that Chen Dingshan has been called the last heir of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school?

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Picture of the day

Duck and Cover is a 1951 American civil-defense animated and live-action social guidance film, directed by Anthony Rizzo. Often mischaracterized as propaganda, it has similar themes to more adult-oriented civil-defense training films. It was widely distributed to schoolchildren in the United States in the 1950s, and teaches students what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion. The film starts with an animated sequence showing Bert, an anthropomorphic turtle, who is attacked by a monkey holding a lit firecracker or stick of dynamite on the end of a string. Bert ducks into his shell as the charge goes off; it destroys both the monkey and the tree in which he is sitting, but Bert is left unharmed. The film then switches to live footage as a narrator explains what children should do when they see the flash of an atomic bomb while in various environments. It is suggested that by ducking down low in the event of a nuclear explosion, such as crawling under desks, children would be safer than they would be standing. In 2004, Duck and Cover was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".Film credit: Anthony Rizzo

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