29 August

Interior of the cathedral in Brasilia,
capital of Brazil

Seven years ago, on 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and indeed a large part of the US Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida. It left more than 1 800 people dead and more than  $80 billion in damage.

On this day in 1842, Portugal recognized the Independence of Brazil, after a bitter war of independence following Dom Pedro I being declared Emperor of Brazil on 12 October 1822.  The country became a republic in 1889 and is today the largest country in South America and the 5th largest in the world.

A little more than a century later, in 1949, the Soviet Union became the second country to test an atomic weapon - a 22 kiloton device nickknamed 'First Lightning'. I do wish the US and Russia never started the nuclear arms race and were not subsequently joined by the other countries who developed those weapons of mass destruction...

Today also marks something more upbeat, but which was part of another race between the US and the then USSR: the space race.  On this day in 1965,  the Gemini V spacecraft returned to Earth with the two American astronauts Charles Conrad and Gordon Cooper, after orbiting the Earth for more than a week - a record at the time.  Just 4 years later, man would land on our Moon. 

The death of Leonardo da Vinci by Ingres

Finally, two birthdays; the famous French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was born on 29 August 1780. He shared a birthday with among others Henry V, King of England (1387).

25 August

On 25 August 1960, the 17th Olympic Summer Games opened in Rome (the Winter Olympics were then still held in the same year as the Summer Olympics and the 1960 games were at Squaw Valley, US, during February). It was the last Olympics in which South Africa competed while under the Apartheid regime - and also the Olympics in which, among others, Cassius Clay, AKA Muhammad Ali, won boxing's light-heavyweight gold medal.

In 1981 the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn (100 000 km) and on the same day,  Mark Chapman, John Lennon's murderer, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.  Many, many years earlier (1330) AntiPope Nicolaas V overthrew himself - which was almost a millenium after the Council of Nicaea (325) adopted the Nicene Creed establishing the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Birthdays today include authors Frederick Forsyth and Martin Amis, Actor Sean Connery and Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), 1st tsar of Russia.

The two Voyager space probes were launched in 1977 (Voyager 2 on 20 August,  Voyager 1 on 5 September.  But Voyager 1  reached both Jupiter and Saturn sooner, as it was launched in a shorter  trajectory.  Each bears a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that it is ever found by intelligent life forms elsewhere in the Universe.  They include e.g. the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a variety of music clips.