The last person to hold the Hastings barony was Edith Maud Abney-Hastings, the 20th Baroness. She died on 24 February 1960, leaving no son, but five daughters. The barony thus fell into abeyance between her daughters and their descendants.
Lyndon B. Johnson called his running mate John F. Kennedy in Hyannisport, Mass. on Election Night 1960 as the returns came in. Laughing, Kennedy told his aides that Johnson had joked, “I see that we’re winning the South but that you’re losing Ohio.”
The Manned Space Center in Houston was established in 1961 and opened in 1963. It was renamed in 1973 in honor of the late President and Texas native, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston is a retired senior officer of the Royal Australian Air Force.
In March 2014 Houston was appointed to head the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) during the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on 08 March 2014. Of the 227 passengers aboard, 20 of them were employees of Freescale Semiconductor, a company headquartered in Austin TX.
ETA:
Freescale currently ranks 8th among semiconductor companies in the United States and is ranked 16th worldwide, as measured by total revenue.
227 was an American sitcom from 1985 to 1990.
British actress Keira Knightley, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Imitation Game, was born in 1985.
The Imitation Game stars Benedict Cumberbatch, who in real life was kidnapped while filming a movie in South Africa in 2005 and then released just as suddenly in an event he’s never fully made sense of.
Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch was born in London on July 19, 1976, shortly after the U.S. Bicentennial celebration.
The U.S. Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, was also the date of Operation Entebbe, when Israel took back by force all but one of its citizens who had been skyjacked aboard an Air France plane by the PFLP-EO, a pro Palestinian terrorist organization which had received sanctuary from Idi Amin Dada. The only member of the Israeli forces killed was Yonatan Netanyahu, the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Australia celebrated the bicentenary of the founding of the colony of NSW on 26 January 1988.
George H.W. Bush defeated Bob Dole, Pat Robertson, Pete DuPont and others for the Republican Presidential nomination in early 1988, and defeated Democratic standard-bearer Michael S. Dukakis in November.
‘Going on the dole’ is Australian usage for taking unemployment benefits.
Unemployment insurance is an area of exclusive federal jurisdiction in Canada, based on a constitutional amendment in 1940 which had been triggered by the Great Depression. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had previously struck down a federal unemployment act as being a matter of provincial jurisdiction.
The current maximum unemployment benefit[sup]*[/sup] rate in Australia for a single person with no children is $515.60 per fortnight.
- In typical wanky government fashion the official term for the unemployment benefit is the Newstart Allowance.
The word fortnight derives from Old English words meaning “fourteen nights”.
The word sennight is an archaic word for a week, but it is used much more rarely than fortnight.
Sennight: a cool word, I’d never heard of that before. Good trivia.
The word sennight is an abbreviation for seven nights.
ETA:
Sennight, for seven nights, and fortnight, for fourteen nights: These words are relics of the ancient Celtic custom of beginning the day at sunset, a custom observed by the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, and Jews.
Wait, I thought the Canadian Constitution only came about in 1982, before which you had the various BNA Acts? COuld’nt BNA be amended by a simple majority in Canada?
Back in play
The Mercury Seven astronauts remain the only group astronauts whose members flew on all American spacecrafts, the Mercury capsule, Gemini, Apollo CSM and LM, and the Shuttle. One also flew a Soyuz.
The planet Mercury is currently visible in the western sky just after sunset, directly below the bright beacon of Venus. The viewing window is very limited though. Mercury doesn’t become visible until about twenty minutes before it sets.