QUOTE OF THE DAY

BIRTHS

Alberto Fidi,  (1882-1958), an Italian player, FIDE Life Member.
Horst Rittner (1930), a German correspondence chess Grandmaster who was the sixth ICCF World Champion between 1968 and 1971.
Samuel Schweber (1936), an Argentine International Master who won individual silver medal at Leipzig 1960
Ashot Anastasian (1964), an Armenian Grandmaster who won 8 times the national championship.
Alexander Ipatov (1993), a Turkish Grandmaster born in Ukraine who won the World Junior Championship in 2012 and was Turkish championship in 2014 and 2015.

DEATHS

Alexander Cywinski von Puchala (1829-1905), an Austrian chess composer and author of Das indische Problem.
Karel Hromadka (1887-1956), a Czechoslovakian chess Master, twice national champion who gave his name to few lines of the Benoni Defence.
Karl Kockelkorn (1843-1914), an German chess composer.
William Geary (1839-1923), an English chess composer and co-inventor of the chess variant Reflex Chess.

CHESS EVENTS

1972 At the World Championship in Reykjavik, after giving a default win to B. Spassky in game two, R. Fischer agreed to play the third game in a small room backstage, out of sight of the spectators.

WORLD EVENTS

622 The beginning of the Islamic calendar.
1661 The first banknotes in Europe are issued by the Swedish bank Stockholms Banco.
1769 Father Junípero Serra founds California’s first mission, Mission San Diego de Alcalá. Over the following decades, it evolves into the city of San Diego, California.
1779 American Revolutionary War: Light infantry of the Continental Army seize a fortified British Army position in a midnight bayonet attack at the Battle of Stony Point.
1782 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail is first performed.
1790 The District of Columbia is established as the capital of the United States after signature of the Residence Act.
1809 The city of La Paz, in what is today Bolivia, declares its independence from the Spanish Crown during the La Paz revolution and forms the Junta Tuitiva, the first independent government in Spanish America, led by Pedro Domingo Murillo.
1931 Emperor Haile Selassie signs the first constitution of Ethiopia.
1935 The world’s first parking meter is installed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
1942 Holocaust: Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv): The government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13,152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz.
1945 Manhattan Project: The Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
1948 The storming of the cockpit of the Miss Macao passenger seaplane, operated by a subsidiary of the Cathay Pacific Airways, marks the first aircraft hijackingof a commercial plane.
1951 King Leopold III of Belgium abdicates in favor of his son, Baudouin I of Belgium.
1965 The Mont Blanc Tunnel linking France and Italy opens.
1969 Apollo program: Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the Moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Kennedy, Florida.
1973 Watergate scandal: Former White House aide Alexander Butterfield informs the United States Senate that President Richard Nixon had secretly recorded potentially incriminating conversations.
1979 Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr resigns and is replaced by Saddam Hussein.
1991 Ukraine celebrates its first Independence Day.

(Source: Wikipedia)

GAME OF THE DAY