QUOTE OF THE DAY

BIRTHS

Edward Lasker (1885-25.03.1981), an American Master, an engineer by profession, and an author born in Germany.
Josef Louma (1898-07.08.1955), a Czech Master and an engineer who had political problems after the 1948 Czech communist putsch.
Fenny Heemskerk (1919-08.06.2007), a Dutch Woman Grandmaster who won ten times the Women’s Dutch Chess Championship.
Jaroslav Sajtar (1921-04.02.2003),  a Czech FIDE officer and International Arbiter who became an honorary GM.
Marina Makropoulou (1960), a Woman Grandmaster who won nine Greek Women’s Championship.
Miguel Illescas Cordoba (1965), a Spanish Grandmaster and FIDE Senior Trainer who has won the Spanish national championship eight times. He was a leading and successful member of the teams of Deep Blue against Kasparov and Kramnik against Kasparov and Leko.
Artur Jakubiec (1973), a Polish Grandmaster and coach who won 3 Polish Youth Championships.
Andrei Istratescu (1975), a French-Romanian Grandmaster who is living in France since 2011.
Rafal Antoniewski (1990), a Polish Grandmaster who won few Polish Youth Championships.
Monikea Krupa (1977), a Polish Woman Grandmaster.

DEATHS

David Graham Baird (08.10.1913-1854), an American Master.
James Aitken (27.10.1908-1983), a Scotish Master and Ph.D. from Edinburgh University who won ten Scotish championships. During World War II, Aitken worked in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park on solving German Enigma machines.
Georgy Borisenko (25.05 1922-03.12 2012), Soviet-Uzbek Correspondence Grandmaster who finished 2nd in the World Correspondence Championship of 1965.

CHESS EVENTS

1979 Philippines won the Asian Team Championship in Singapore.
1980 The FIDE GA admitted the Chess Federations of Antigua, Brunei, Kenya, Senegal and Zimbabwe as new members.
1989 In Haifa, the Soviet team won the European Team Championship with 36 out of 54 points.
2012 Sergey Karjakin (RUS), Wang Hao (CHN) and Alexander Morozevich (RUS) were  the winners of the FIDE Grand Prix in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
2016 In Las Vegas, Timur Gareyev (USA) made an attempt to break the world record in a blindfold simultaneous play. Without seeing the board Gareyev played against 48 opponents at the same time, more than any player before him.

WORLD EVENTS

1818 Illinois becomes the 21st U.S. state.
1910 Modern neon lighting is first demonstrated by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show.
1927 Putting Pants on Philip, the first Laurel and Hardy film, is released.
1959 The current flag of Singapore is adopted, six months after Singapore became self-governing within the British Empire.
1967 At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, a transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).
1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran.
1984 Bhopal disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
1994 The PlayStation was released in Japan.
2012 At least 475 people are killed after Typhoon Bopha makes landfall in the Philippines.

(Source: Wikipedia)

GAME OF THE DAY