Current events

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  Severe flooding in Yemen caused by Deep Depression ARB 02 (pictured) kills 58 and displaces 20,000.
• A bomb attack in Zagreb, Croatia kills Ivo Pukanić, the owner of the newspaper Nacional.
• The Indian Space Research Organisation successfully launches Chandrayaan-1, an unmanned lunar exploration mission.
• Several additional amino acids are found in vials from the 1953 Miller–Urey experiment that probed the origin of life.
• 
  The United Nations General Assembly elects Turkey, Austria, Japan, Uganda, and Mexico to two-year terms on the Security Council.

On this day

• 1597Imjin War: About 12 Korean ships commanded by admiral Yi Sun-sin defeated a large Japanese invasion fleet of at least 300 at the Battle of Myeongnyang in the Myeongnyang Strait.
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  1944 World War II: In one of the largest naval battles in modern history, Allied forces defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the seas surrounding the Philippine island of Leyte.
• 1881 The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, one of the most famous gunfights in the history of the American Old West, took place in Tombstone, Arizona between the faction of Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton's gang.
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  2001 President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law, significantly expanding the authority of U.S. law enforcement agencies in fighting terrorism at home and abroad.
• 2002 About 40 Chechen rebels and 130 hostages died when Russian forces stormed a theater building in Moscow to end a four-day hostage siege.

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• AMiBA (pictured) is a radio telescope on Mauna Loa in Hawaii that is being used to observe the cosmic microwave background and the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect in clusters of galaxies
• Although the official government death toll of the 1997 Ardabil earthquake was given as 965 deaths, rescue workers at the scene claimed it was as much as three times higher
• Tang Dynasty general Li Na was, at one point, reduced to tears when he was under siege by another general, Liu Qia
• Four of the candidates for either Governor or Lt. Governor in the 2008 American Samoa gubernatorial elections have ancestral ties to the Manu'a Islands

Picture of the day

Plate 5 from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur showing a variety of calcareous sponges, a class of about 400 marine sponges found worldwide, mostly in shallow tropical waters.

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