The Iranian Embassy siege took place from 30 April to 5 May 1980, after
a group of six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in London. The
gunmen, members of an Iranian Arab group campaigning for Arab national
sovereignty in Khūzestān Province, took 26 hostages and demanded the
release of Arab prisoners from jails in Khūzestān. Police negotiators
gradually secured the release of five hostages in exchange for minor
concessions. On the sixth day the gunmen, frustrated at the lack of
progress, killed a hostage and threw his body out of the embassy. The
British government ordered the Special Air Service (SAS), a special
forces regiment, to rescue the hostages. During the 17-minute raid, the
SAS rescued all but one of the remaining hostages, and killed five of
the gunmen. The hostage-takers and their cause were largely forgotten
afterwards, but the operation brought the SAS to public attention. It
was overwhelmed by the number of applications it received from people
inspired by the operation and experienced greater demand for its
expertise from foreign governments. The building suffered major damage
from fire (aftermath pictured) and did not reopen as the embassy until
1993.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Embassy_siege>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1006:
SN 1006 (remnant pictured), the brightest supernova in recorded
history, first appeared in the constellation Lupus.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006>
1636:
Eighty Years' War: Dutch Republic forces recaptured a
strategically important fort from Spain after a nine-month siege.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Schenkenschans>
1982:
Sixteen monks and a nun belonging to Ananda Marga in Calcutta,
India, were dragged out of taxis by persons unknown in three different
locations, beaten to death and then set on fire.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijon_Setu_massacre>
1993:
Monica Seles, the number-one ranked women's tennis player at
the time, was stabbed in the back during a match by a man obsessed with
her rival Steffi Graf.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Seles>
2004:
The New Yorker magazine posted an article and supporting
pictures online, postdated May 10, detailing accounts of torture and
abuse by American personnel of prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison
in Baghdad.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
capacious:
Having a lot of space inside; roomy.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/capacious>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely
greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching
ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our
future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside
the province of science.
--Carl Friedrich Gauss
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss>