Today in History: March 11, massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan kill nearly 20,000
Today in history:
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami struck Japan's northeastern coast, killing nearly 20,000 people and severely damaging the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.
Also on this date:
In 1918, what were believed to be the first confirmed U.S. cases of a deadly global flu pandemic were reported among U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas; 46 soldiers would die. (The influenza outbreak would ultimately kill an estimated 20 million to 40 million people worldwide.)
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, which provided war supplies to Allied countries during World War II.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen to succeed the late Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
In 2004, three days before general elections in Spain, 10 bombs exploded in quick succession inside commuter trains in Madrid, killing 193 people in an attack linked to al-Qaida-inspired militants.
In 2006, former Serb leader Slobodan Milošević was found dead at age 64 of a heart attack in his prison cell in the Netherlands, abruptly ending his four-year U.N. war crimes trial.
In 2010, a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld the use of the words 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and 'In God We Trust' on U.S. currency.
In 2012, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales shot and killed 16 Afghan villagers — mostly women and children — as they slept. (Bales later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.)
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package that he said would help defeat the virus and nurse the economy back to health. Lower-income Americans would receive up to $1,400 in direct payments, along with extended unemployment benefits.
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- UPI
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda reach peace agreement
Captured Democratic Republic of the Congo troops being marched into Rwanda from the border city of Goma by Rwanda Defence Force soldiers in January. File Photo by Moise Niyonzima/EPA-EFE June 19 (UPI) -- Rwanda will sign a U.S.-Qatar-mediated peace agreement with neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, bringing an end to a decades-long armed conflict within days. The two sides' technical delegations initialed the pact Tuesday in Washington, pledging to "disengage and disarm," deal with non-state armed groups, establish a joint security cooperation mechanism and allow refugees and displaced people to return, the State Department said in a statement. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been heavily involved in bringing the deal to fruition, will witness the official signing by ministers from Rwanda and the DRC at a ceremony in Washington on June 27. "The agreement was developed over three days of constructive dialogue regarding political, security, and economic interests. The agreement includes provisions on respect for territorial integrity and a prohibition of hostilities," the State Department said. Its statement paid tribute Qatar's contribution in helping to close the gap between the two countries' individual initiatives aimed at bringing peace to the region. The deal comes two months after Rubio persuaded the parties to sign a peace framework after the violence escalated to unprecedented levels in January as Rwandan-backed M23 rebels overran large areas of northeastern DRC, displacing tens of thousands of people. The region already was reeling from one of the world's worst humanitarian crises when the rebels launched their offensive, overwhelming government forces and killing U.N. peacekeepers, firing on U.N. humanitarian facilities and sending people fleeing from displacement camps. The BBC said that peace in the region could unlock billions of dollars of investment from the West into the resource-rich country, which has vast reserves of many critical minerals, including rare earths. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, DRC has "substantial" untapped deposits of gold, cobalt and high-grade copper, as well as diamonds and lithium, a key element for powering the green power transition. However, that mineral wealth has been disastrous for the country, historically, and is blamed, at least in part, for the current conflict, with DRC officials accusing Kigali of purposefully destabilizing its neighbor to get its hands on the minerals. The DRC reportedly offered access to its resources to the United States in exchange for assistance in resolving the conflict after it effectively lost control of the east of the country at the beginning of the year. In February, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Rwandan Regional Integration Minister James Kabarebe for backing the M23 along with Lawrence Kanyuka, a senior member of the group, and two of his companies. Condemning M23 human rights abuses, including killings, sexual violence and attacks against civilians, Treasury officials said Kabarebe, a former Rwandan Defense Force general, was responsible for RDF coordination with the M23 and was in charge of revenue generation of both outfits, funded from the DRC's mineral resources. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control alleged Kabarebe managed the cross-border movement of minerals taken from mining sites in the DRC, which subsequently found their way onto the international market after being exported from Rwanda.
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Congo and Rwanda sign preliminary peace agreement in Washington
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Trump bans ‘negative' signage at national parks, asks visitors to snitch on unpatriotic text
In his ongoing war on 'woke,' President Trump has instructed the National Park Service to scrub any language he would deem negative, unpatriotic or smacking of 'improper partisan ideology' from signs and presentations visitors encounter at national parks and historic sites. Instead, his administration has ordered the national parks and hundreds of other monuments and museums supervised by the Department of the Interior to ensure that all of their signage reminds Americans of our 'extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.' Those marching orders, which went into effect late last week, have left Trump opponents and free speech advocates gasping in disbelief, wondering how park employees are supposed to put a sunny spin on monuments acknowledging slavery and Jim Crow laws. And how they'll square the story of Japanese Americans shipped off to incarceration camps during World War II with an 'unmatched record of advancing liberty.' At Manzanar National Historic Site, a dusty encampment in the high desert of eastern California, one of 10 camps where more than 120,000 Japanese American civilians were imprisoned during the early 1940s, employees put up a required notice describing the changes last week. Like all such notices across the country, it includes a QR code visitors can use to report any signs they see that are 'negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes'. An identical sign is up at the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Kern County, a tribute to the struggle to ensure better wages and safer working conditions for immigrant farm laborers. Such signs are going up across the sprawling system, which includes Fort Sumter National Monument, where Confederates fired the first shots of the Civil War; Ford's Theater National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park. So, nothing negative about John Wilkes Booth or James Earl Ray? In response to an email requesting comment, a National Park Service spokesperson did not address questions about specific parks or monuments, saying only that changes would be made 'where appropriate.' The whole thing is 'flabbergasting,' said Dennis Arguelles, Southern California director for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Assn. 'These stories may not be flattering to American heritage, but they're an integral part of our history. 'If we lose these stories, then we're in danger of repeating some of these mistakes,' Arguelles said. Trump titled his March 27 executive order requiring federal sign writers to look on the bright side 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.' He specifically instructed the Interior Department to scrutinize any signs put up since January 2020 — the beginning of the Biden administration — for language that perpetuates 'a false reconstruction' of American history. Trump called out signs that 'undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.' He specifically cited the National Historical Park in Philadelphia and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., as bowing to what he described as the previous administration's zeal to cast 'our Nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness' as 'inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.' His solution? Order federal employees and historians to rewrite the 'revisionist' history with language that exudes patriotism. 'It all seems pretty Orwellian,' said Kimbrough Moore, a rock climber and Yosemite National Park guide book author. After news of the impending changes began circulating in park circles, he posted on Instagram a sign he saw in the toilet at the Porcupine Flat campground in the middle of the park. Across from the ubiquitous sign in all park bathrooms that says, 'Please DO NOT put trash in toilets, it is extremely difficult to remove,' someone added a placard that reads, 'Please DO NOT put trash in the White House. It is extremely difficult to remove.' Predictably, the post went viral, proving what would-be censors have known for centuries: Policing language is a messy business and can be hard to control in a free society. 'Even the pooper can be a venue for resistance,' Moore wrote.
