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Thursday February 26, 2015

  • 57th Day of 2015 308 Remaining
  • Spring Begins in 22 Days
  • Sunrise:6:44
  • Sunset:6:00
  • 11 Hours 16 Minutes
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  • Moon Rise:12:09pm
  • Moon Set:1:44am
  • Phase:61%
  • Full Moon March 5 @ 10:06am
  • As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.
  • Tides
  • High:4:35am/6:45pm
  • Low:11:53am/11:41pm
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  • Rainfall:
  • This Year to Date:17.01
  • Last Year:6.22
  • Avg YTD:17.79
  • Annual Avg:23.80
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  • Holidays
  • Tell A Fairy Tale Day
  • National Chili Day
  • For Pete’s Sake Day
  • National Pistachio Day
  • Personal Chefs Day
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  • Liberation Day –Kuwait
  • On This Day
  • 1815 --- Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from the island of Elba to begin his second conquest of France.
  • 1862 --- Union soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes visits Washington, D.C., during a typical week in winter quarters. Although combat was the main job of a soldier, most men serving in the Civil War spent very few days each year in actual combat. Rhodes kept a diary during his four years in the Union Army, and his notes reveal the monotony of the winter months for the Army of the Potomac. A member of the 2nd Rhode Island, Rhodes fought in every campaign from First Bull Run to Appomattox, and rose from private to colonel in four years.
  • 1895 --- Michael Joseph Owens of Toledo, Ohio patented an automatic glass blowing machine that could make multiple bottles at the same time. A big advance in bottle making. He founded the Owens Bottle Machine Co., and the Libbey-Owens Glass Company.
  • 1908 --- At midnight (Feb 25/26), service through the Hudson & Manhattan railway tunnels opened to the public, carrying passengers between Manhattan and Hoboken New Jersey. It was the first railroad tunnel under a major river in the U.S.
  • 1919 --- Grand Canyon National Park was established. Located in northwestern Arizona, the Grand Canyon is the product of millions of years of excavation by the mighty Colorado River. The chasm is exceptionally deep, dropping more than a mile into the earth, and is 15 miles across at its widest point. The canyon is home to more than 1,500 plant species and over 500 animal species, many of them endangered or unique to the area, and it's steep, multi-colored walls tell the story of 2 billion years of Earth's history. In 1540, members of an expedition sent by the Spanish explorer Coronado became the first Europeans to discover the canyon, though because of its remoteness the area was not further explored until 300 years later. American geologist John Wesley Powell, who popularized the term "Grand Canyon" in the 1870s, became the first person to journey the entire length of the gorge in 1869. The harrowing voyage was made in four rowboats. In January 1908, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon a national monument; it was designated a national park under President Woodrow Wilson.
  • 1929 --- Grand Teton National Park was established in Wyoming. In 1916, Horace M. Albright, the director of the National Park Service, was the first to seriously suggest that the region be incorporated into Yellowstone. The ranchers and businesses catering to tourists, however, strongly resisted the suggestion that they be pushed off their lands to make a "museum" of the Old West for eastern tourists. Finally, after more than a decade of political maneuvering, Grand Teton National Park was created in 1929. As a concession to the ranchers and tourist operators, the park only encompassed the mountains and a narrow strip at their base. Jackson Hole itself was excluded from the park and designated merely as a scenic preserve. Albright, though, had persuaded the wealthy John D. Rockefeller to begin buying up land in the Jackson Hole area for possible future incorporation into the park. This semisecret, private means of enlarging the park inspired further resentment among the residents, and some complained that it was a typical example of how "eastern money interests" were dictating the future of the West.
  • 1930 --- New York City installed traffic lights.
  • 1933 --- A ground-breaking ceremony was held at Crissy Field for the Golden Gate Bridge. 
  • 1949 --- From Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, the Lucky Lady II, a B-50 Superfortress, takes off on the first nonstop round-the-world flight. Under the command of Captain James Gallagher, and featuring a crew of 14 men, the aircraft averaged 249 miles per hour on its 23,452-mile trek. The Lucky Lady II was refueled four times in the air by B-29 tanker planes and on March 2 returned to the United States after 94 hours in the air.
  • 1968 --- Allied troops who had recaptured the imperial capital of Hue from the North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive discover the first mass graves in Hue. It was discovered that communist troops who had held the city for 25 days had massacred about 2,800 civilians whom they had identified as sympathizers with the government in Saigon. One authority estimated that communists might have killed as many as 5,700 people in Hue.
  • 1970 --- National Public Radio was incorporated.
  • 1972 --- A dam collapses in West Virginia on this day in 1972, flooding a valley and killing 118 people. Another 4,000 people were left homeless. Coal mining was the chief industry in Logan County, West Virginia, in the 1970s. Such mining poses many environmental complications and first among them is safe disposal of the byproduct, known as tailings. If the tailings are dumped on hills, they can cause landslides. If placed in valleys, they can block streams and cause flooding. In West Virginia's Buffalo Creek Valley, tailings from area coal mines were used to dam Buffalo Creek. Tailings can however be unstable, especially in heavy rain. In February 1972, three days of rain exacerbated two small dam breaks that had occurred several years earlier. On February 26 at 8:01 a.m., the dam burst, unleashing a 20-foot wall of water that roared into the valley. About 4,000 people were living in 17 towns and villages in Buffalo Creek Valley at the time. Hundreds of homes and buildings were swept away by the powerful flood. Though estimates of the death toll vary, it is believed that at least 118 people lost their lives. The Buffalo Mining Company, which was responsible for the tailings, was forced to pay $30 million in damages.
  • 1977 --- The Eagles' "Hotel California" was released.
  • 1979 --- The Sex Pistols released the album "The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle." 
  • 1984 --- The last U.S. Marines sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force leave Beirut, the war-torn Lebanese capital where some 250 of the original 800 Marines lost their lives during the problem-plagued 18-month mission. In 1975, a bloody civil war erupted in Lebanon, with Palestinian and leftist Muslim guerrillas battling militias of the Christian Phalange Party, the Maronite Christian community, and other groups. During the next few years, Syrian, Israeli, and United Nations interventions failed to resolve the factional fighting, and on August 20, 1982, a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines was ordered to Beirut to help coordinate the Palestinian withdrawal.
  • 1986 --- Corazon Aquino was inaugurated president of the Philippines. Long time President Ferdinand Marcos went into exile. 
  • 1990 --- A year after agreeing to free elections, Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government loses at the polls. The elections brought an end to more than a decade of U.S. efforts to unseat the Sandinista government.
  • 1993 --- At 12:18 p.m., a terrorist bomb explodes in a parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, leaving a crater 60 feet wide and causing the collapse of several steel-reinforced concrete floors in the vicinity of the blast. Although the terrorist bomb failed to critically damage the main structure of the skyscrapers, six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The World Trade Center itself suffered more than $500 million in damage. After the attack, authorities evacuated 50,000 people from the buildings, hundreds of whom were suffering from smoke inhalation. The evacuation lasted the whole afternoon. City authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undertook a massive manhunt for suspects, and within days several radical Islamic fundamentalists were arrested. In March 1994, Mohammed Salameh, Ahmad Ajaj, Nidal Ayyad, and Mahmoud Abouhalima were convicted by a federal jury for their role in the bombing, and each was sentenced to life in prison. Salameh, a Palestinian, was arrested when he went to retrieve the $400 deposit he had left for the Ryder rental van used in the attack. Ajaj and Ayyad, who both played a role in the construction of the bomb, were arrested soon after. Abouhalima, who helped buy and mix the explosives, fled to Saudi Arabia but was caught in Egypt two weeks later.
  • 1995 --- Barings PLC collapsed after a securities dealer lost more than $1.4 billion by gambling on Tokyo stock prices. The company was Britain's oldest investment banking firm.
  • 2001 --- A U.N. tribunal convicted Bosnian Croat political leader Dario Kordic and military commander Mario Cerkez of war crimes for ordering the systematic murder and persecution of Muslim civilians during the Bosnian war.
  • 2012 --- Trayvon Martin, an African-American teen walking home from a trip to a convenience store, is fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer patrolling the townhouse community of the Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman later claimed to have shot the unarmed 17-year-old out of self-defense during a physical altercation.
  • Birthdays
  • Levi Strauss
  • Priscilla Lopez
  • Erykah Badu
  • William “Buffalo Bill” Cody
  • John Harvey Kellogg
  • Antoine “Fats” Domino
  • Johnny Cash
  • King Wenceslas (1361-1419)
  • Victor Hugo
  • William Frawley
  • Jackie Gleason
  • Betty Hutton