July 2019 - PopHistory.org

BCPS Transportation Department Powers Up for the New School Year with a New Radio System Migration of Non-public Safety Radios from Broward County Public Safety Radio System Completed Ahead of Schedule

Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) has completed the migration of its existing school bus radio system from the public safety radio system to the new Local Government Trunked Radio System (LGTRS), which was planned for the start of the school year.

The installation of all school bus radios for the entire fleet (1,367), four dispatch control stations, 14 fleet maintenance trucks and all 314 two-way hand-held portable radios, is completed 10 days ahead of schedule. BCPS’s migration to the LGTRS is a separate, but parallel, effort from the purchase and distribution of an additional 1,100 two-way hand-held portable radios distributed to more than 190 of District schools in March 2019.

Since the beginning of the process, BCPS and Broward County have worked together to assure seamless and on-time completion, including delivery and programming of the radios, installation of the control station, radio testing, installation and training.

“The migrated system will continue to provide reliable communication to our busses each day without impacting the capacity of the public safety system,” said Superintendent Robert W. Runcie. “The positive collaboration between BCPS and Broward County on this complex migration process was key to its momentum, efficiency and overall success.”

“The new $1.3 million investment in infrastructure, paid for by Broward County with General Fund (ad valorem) dollars and implemented ahead of schedule and before the start of the new school year, achieves the goal of moving non-public safety communications off the public safety radio system, which ensures that public safety first responders have a dedicated public safety radio system and it saves money for local government and public school users,” said County Administrator Bertha Henry.

In June 2019, summer school dispatchers and school bus drivers were trained, including call-ins to dispatch through the two-way system on their dry runs to ensure the system is functioning properly. Transportation specialists, transportation supervisors and terminal managers were trained on the new system earlier this month, with the remainder of school bus driver training scheduled just prior to the start of school.

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ABOUT BROWARD COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

“Committed to educating all students to reach their highest potential.”

Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) is the sixth-largest school district in the nation and the second-largest in the state of Florida. BCPS is Florida’s first fully accredited school system since 1962. BCPS has more than 271,500 students and approximately 175,000 adult students in 234 schools, centers and technical colleges, and 88 charter schools. BCPS serves a diverse student population, with students representing 204 different countries and 191 different languages. Connect with BCPS: visit the website atbrowardschools.com, follow BCPS on Twitter @browardschools and Facebook at facebook.com/browardschools, and download the free BCPS mobile app.

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Angela Merkel becomes Chancellor of Germany

Year: 2005

Month Day: November 22

Angela Merkel is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on November 22, 2005. The first woman to hold the position, Merkel emerged as one of the strongest forces in European politics over the subsequent decade. She has frequently been called the most powerful woman in the world and the de facto leader of the European Union.

Merkel was raised and educated in East Germany. She earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry and worked as a research scientist, only entering politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After serving as a spokesperson for the caretaker East German government, she was elected to the Bundestag in the first election after unification in 1990. Helmut Kohl, the first chancellor of the reunified state, appointed her to successive cabinet positions and championed her career. When Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union was voted out in 1998, Merkel became the party’s Secretary-General and then its Leader. After a tight election and two weeks of negotiations with the CDU’s coalition partners, Merkel became Chancellor in 2005.

Merkel’s tenure has been characterized by her desire for a strong EU and by the crises it has faced. Governing from the center-right, by European standards, she drew criticism from the left after the 2008 financial crisis due the perception that Germany was imposing severe austerity measures on Greece. In 2015, she made the controversial announcement that Germany would process asylum applications for Syrian refugees who had arrived elsewhere in Europe, including those being forced out of Hungary by far-right prime minister Viktor Orban. Merkel was close with American presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but questioned the United States’ commitment to Europe after meeting with Donald Trump. She is also an outspoken critic of Britain’s decision to leave the EU and of Vladimir Putin.

Though her popularity in Germany has vacillated considerably, Merkel is currently the longest-tenured head of government in Europe. She stepped down as leader of her party in 2018 and has announced that she does not plan to run for re-election as Chancellor in 2021.

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George Harrison, lead guitarist for the Beatles, dies

Year: 2001

Month Day: November 29

On November 29, 2001, English musician and songwriter George Harrison dies at the age of 58. Harrison achieved global fame as a member of the Beatles and went on to a successful solo career that included frequent collaborations with many of the foremost musicians of his generation.

The youngest member of the Beatles, Harrison was born in Liverpool in 1943 and joined the group, then known as the Quarrymen, when he was barely 15. Harrison became the group’s lead guitarist and frequently sang, but he developed a reputation as the “quiet Beatle” and was oftentimes overshadowed by the duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Nonetheless, his influence on the group, and on rock music in general, was profound. Harrison’s use of sitar on the 1965 track “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” introduced the instrument to Western popular culture. Along with other Harrison innovations, such as the backwards guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping,” it became a defining feature of psychedelic rock.

Harrison’s first solo album, All Things Must Pass, featured former bandmate Ringo Starr as well as guitar virtuoso Eric Clapton, a close friend of Harrison’s, and was an enormous success. The following year, Harrison organized the Concert for Bangladesh, a charity event now recognized as the first celebrity benefit concert. The concert drew over 40,000 people to Madison Square Garden and the resulting live album won the Grammy for Album of the Year. After Lennon’s murder, Harrison wrote the tribute “All Those Years Ago” and recorded it with McCartney and Starr.

Harrison released many solo records, but he was known for his love of collaboration. In 1988, he formed a supergroup, the Travelling Willburys, with Jeff Lyne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. He befriended the surrealist comedy troupe Monty Python, mortgaging his home in order to finance their iconic film, Life of Brian, and remained close with Clapton even after Patti Boyd left Harrison for him. One of the Pythons, Eric Idle, described Harrison as “one of the few morally good people that rock and roll has produced.” Harrison died of throat cancer on this day in 2001, with his second wife Olivia and their son Dhani by his side.

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BCPS to Hold Job Fair for School Bus Drivers

July 24, 2019

WHO:
Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) Students Transportation and Fleet Services

WHAT:
BCPS Student Transportation and Fleet Services is holding a job fair for individuals interested in becoming school bus drivers. District staff will be available at the event to assist with the completion of the online application, conduct on-the-spot interviews and explain the training and hiring processes.

WHEN:
Saturday, July 27, 2019
7 a.m. – 3 p.m.

WHERE:
Central Transportation Terminal
3895 NW 10th Avenue
Oakland Park, FL 33309

WHY:
BCPS is looking to fill immediate openings for bus drivers in time for the opening of the new school year. School bus drivers enjoy flexible hours, on-the-job training for a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL), a starting salary of $15.10 an hour and guaranteed 37.5 hours per work week, benefits valued at more than $7,500, free medical and a etirement plan. While no experience is necessary, the minimum requirements for the school bus drivers include, five years licensed driving experience, excellent driving record, good health (must pass Department of Transportation medical exam), able to obtain a CDL, pass school bus driver class (training and testing provided), and pass drug and alcohol test. For more information about the job fair, visit browardschools.com/transportation or call 754-321-4400.

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ABOUT BROWARD COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

“Committed to educating all students to reach their highest potential.”

Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) is the sixth-largest school district in the nation and the second-largest in the state of Florida. BCPS is Florida’s first fully accredited school system since 1962. BCPS has more than 271,500 students and approximately 175,000 adult students in 234 schools, centers and technical colleges, and 88 charter schools. BCPS serves a diverse student population, with students representing 204 different countries and 191 different languages. Connect with BCPS: visit the website at browardschools.com, follow BCPS on Twitter @browardschools and Facebook at facebook.com/browardschools, and download the free BCPS mobile app.

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Microsoft releases Xbox gaming console

Year: 2001

Month Day: November 15

Microsoft releases the Xbox gaming console on November 15, 2001, dramatically influencing the history of consumer entertainment technology.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates first decided to venture into the video game market because he feared that gaming consoles would soon compete with personal computers. At the time, Japanese companies Sony and Nintendo dominated the field, and no American company had challenged them since Atari ceased selling its Jaguar console in 1996.

Sony was positioning its Playstation 2 as an “entertainment system” meant not only for gaming but also for playing DVDs, music and other media. In order to rise to this challenge, Microsoft designed the first-ever gaming system to use PC technology, such as an internal hard disk drive. The original plan was to include a dial-up modem, still a common internet technology at the time, but the designers opted instead to exclusively use a high-speed Ethernet cable, a decision which would allow the Xbox to set a new standard in online gaming. Microsoft acquired the game developer Bungie and used its new first-person shooter, Halo: Combat Evolved, as its launch title.

Developing the Xbox had been enormously expensive, and the cost of building each unit outweighed the sales price, which meant game sales were crucial to the project’s success. Luckily for Microsoft, their launch title was one of the best-selling and most celebrated games of all time. Halo ushered in a new age of first-person shooters and online gaming, revolutionizing the video game market, and it established Xbox as a haven for innovative game design. Microsoft is said to have lost $4 billion on the initial Xbox, but its successors have sold over a hundred million units and continue to set the standard for entertainment systems.

READ MORE: The History of Video Games

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ISIL stages series of terrorist attacks in Paris, culminating in massacre at Bataclan theater

Year: 2015

Month Day: November 13

On November 13, 2015, a cell of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant commits a string of terrorist attacks across Paris, killing 131 and injuring over 400. It was the deadliest day in France since World War II, as well as the deadliest operation ISIL has carried out in Europe to date.

2015 had already seen a number of major terrorist attacks, in France and elsewhere. In January, a group known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula carried out five separate attacks across the city, the deadliest of which occurred at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The following months, terrorists attacked a Jewish community center in Nice. In August, passengers prevented a self-identified “jihadist” from carrying out a shooting a train from Amsterdam to Paris, and on October 31 ISIL claimed responsibility for the bombing of Metrojet Flight 9268 en route to St. Petersburg, which killed 224.

The attacks on this day began with a series of suicide bombings outside the Stade de France, where the French national soccer team was playing Germany with President François Hollande in attendance. One person was killed, but further bloodshed was averted because the bombers failed to enter the stadium. The stadium attack was immediately followed by a string of shootings and another bombing at restaurants closer to the city center, culminating in a massacre and hostage-taking at the Bataclan theater in the middle of a sold-out rock concert. After more than two hours, the French police stormed the theater, resulting in the deaths of the three assailants.

As France mourned, its government declared a state of emergency and stepped up its bombing campaign against ISIL. On November 18, one of a series of police raids across the region resulted in the death of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged mastermind of the attack. Abaaoud held dual Belgian and Moroccan citizenship, while seven of the nine Paris attackers were either Belgian or French. The perpetrators had ties to ISIL’s Brussels cell, which coordinated a number of attacks in Europe including a string of suicide bombings in the Belgian capital the following March. Though a number of ISIL-inspired stabbings and attacks, usually by one or two isolated perpetrators, occurred across France throughout 2016 and 2017, the Paris attacks represent the high-water mark for ISIL’s activities in Europe.

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Hillary Clinton is elected to the U.S. Senate

Year: 2000

Month Day: November 07

On November 7, 2000, Hillary Clinton is elected to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, becoming the first First Lady to win elected office.

Clinton’s resume was unique among First Ladies and among senators. After meeting her husband, Bill, at Yale Law School, she spent her early career as an advocate for children’s rights and was named to the board of the Legal Services Corporation. During Bill’s presidency, she took an active role in promoting the administration’s healthcare policy and used her position to bring attention to children’s rights and family law issues. Despite the fact that her husband was currently under impeachment for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, New York Democrats approached Clinton about running for senate near the end of his term. She announced her candidacy after purchasing property in Chappaqua, New York and waiting for the impeachment proceedings to end.

Clinton visited every county of New York in an effort to stave off the inevitable charge that she was a “carpetbagger.” Recruited to run in part because her “star power” could counteract that of her presumptive Republican opponent, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Clinton’s chances improved when Giuliani dropped out of the race due to health issues and controversies around the recent dissolution of his marriage. His replacement, Rick Lazio, raised tens of millions of dollars but ultimately garnered only 43 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 55.

Although the news was overshadowed nationally by the presidential election, which was too close to call and would not be decided until December, Clinton’s election received equal billing with the presidential saga on the front page of the New York Times. Though she had been a public, political figure for much of her life, winning a campaign for federal office marked an important moment in her career. After one term in the senate, she would vie for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, fighting a hard but unsuccessful campaign against Barack Obama. She went on to serve as Obama’s Secretary of State and eventually win the nomination, becoming the first woman in a major party to do so, before winning the popular vote but losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

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Election results between Al Gore and George Bush too close to call

Year: 2000

Month Day: November 07

This date in 2000 was a pivotal moment in U.S. history, as the presidential election results in a statistical tie between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush. The results in Florida were unclear by the end of election night and resulted in a recount and a Supreme Court case, Bush v. Gore, which ended the dispute in favor of Bush a month later. The election exposed several flaws and controversial elements of the American electoral process and was the fourth of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote.

Gore was the sitting Vice President to then-president Bill Clinton, while Bush was the Governor of Texas and son of former president George H.W. Bush. In the national popular vote, Gore received 48.4 percent while Bush received 47.9, losing by over 540,000 votes. U.S. presidents, however, are chosen by the Electoral College, a system in which “electoral votes” are assigned to states based on their population and then awarded as a lump sum to the winner of the popular vote in that state—currently, it takes 270 electoral votes to win. By the end of Election Night, 2000, Gore’s tally stood at 250 and Bush’s stood at 246 with Oregon, Wisconsin and Florida too close to call.

Oregon and Wisconsin went to Gore in the following days, but Florida’s 25 electoral votes made it the key to victory for both candidates. The initial result there put Bush in front, but it was close enough to trigger an automatic recount. The ensuing saga involved multiple legal battles, recounts and calls for further recounts, and numerous debates about the methods used to record votes. On December 12, the Supreme Court ordered an end to the Florida recount and Gore conceded to Bush.

Many have suggested that the perceived partisan nature of Court’s decision—every justice who sided with Bush had been appointed by a Republican—damaged the public’s faith in the judicial system. The 2000 election was the first since the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon that did not yield a clear result on election night or the following morning. It was the first time since 1888 that the winning candidate had lost the popular vote, although the next such election came only 16 years later when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Both elections led to calls for the abolition of the Electoral College in favor of a simpler “one person, one vote” system, but there has been no serious push to enact such a reform.

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One World Trade Center officially opens in New York City, on the site of the Twin Towers

One World Trade Center officially opens in Manhattan on November 3, 2014. The new tower, along with the rest of the World Trade Center complex, replaced the Twin Towers and surrounding complex, which were destroyed by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

As the city and the nation reeled from the attacks, which set into motion the series of U.S-led military operations dubbed the War on Terror, it was decided that the Twin Towers should be replaced by new office buildings, parks, a museum, and a memorial to those who died. In 2002, after cleanup and recovery efforts had concluded, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced a competition to find the chief architect of the new structure. Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-American architect then in charge of a studio in Berlin, won and became the site’s master planner. In reality, however, a number of people and entities, including then-Governor George Pataki, leaseholder Larry Silverstein, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, wrestled over what would happen to the space commonly referred to as “Ground Zero.”

The initial plans for the site were steeped in post-9/11 patriotic sentiment. Libeskind designed an asymmetrical tower that evoked the Statue of Liberty and stood at the same height as the original World Trade Center, topped with a spire rising to 1,776 feet. Pataki dubbed it the “Freedom Tower,” a name which became commonplace but had largely faded from use by the time One World Trade Center opened.

In 2004, Silverstein’s preferred architect, David Childs, officially took over, with Libeskind staying on as the planner of the site. Childs’ “final” design, a symmetrical and more traditional tower that tapers into an octagon at its midway point and then back into a rectangular prism, was unveiled in 2005. The New York Police Department requested further alterations, most notably a windowless, solid concrete base. Meant to protect against truck bombs and other potential attacks, the base has was criticized as “a grotesque attempt to hide [the building’s] underlying paranoia” by New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff.

Though its cornerstone was laid in 2004, construction on One World Trade did not begin until the summer of 2006. The slow pace of construction—the tower “topped off” in August 2012 and the spire was not installed until May 2013—was a frequent source of consternation for the building’s developers and the city. At the same time, it allowed space for the tower to become more than a reminder of what had been lost. As architecture critic Kurt Andersen put it, “The fact that it’s taken more than a decade to finish, I think —the gradualism—makes that sense of emblematic rebirth more acute and irresistible.”

Prior to the opening, media conglomerate Condé Nast announced that it would move its New York headquarters from Times Square to One World Trade Center, occupying floors 20 through 44. Its location and the legacy of the original World Trade Center made the tower a natural choice for many financial institutions, but the building’s developers made an effort to bring in a diverse group of tenants, including media and tech companies. Known for its floor-to-ceiling, 360 degree views of Manhattan, Long Island, New Jersey and New York Harbor, One World Trade is now one of the most notable features of the Manhattan skyline, a tribute to the buildings that preceded it but a 21st century New York phenomenon in its own right.

READ MORE: How Ground Zero Got Rebuilt

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First residential crew arrives aboard the International Space Station

Year: 2000

Month Day: November 02

On November 2, 2000, the first residential crew arrives aboard the International Space Station. The arrival of Expedition 1 marked the beginning of a new era of international cooperation in space and of the longest continuous human habitation in low Earth orbit, which continues to this day.

The space agencies of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe agreed to cooperate on the ISS in 1998, and its first components were launched into orbit later that year. Five space shuttle flights and two unmanned Russian flights delivered many of its core components and partially assembled the space station. Two Russians, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, accompanied by NASA’s Bill Shepherd, were selected as the crew of Expedition 1.

The trio arrived at the ISS on a Russian Soyuz rocket launched from Kazakhstan. Unlike all subsequent missions, Expedition 1’s tasks consisted mostly of constructing and installing various components and activating others. This was sometimes easier said than done: the crew reported taking over a day to activate one of the station’s food warmers. Throughout their time in space, they were visited and resupplied by two unmanned Russian rockets and three space shuttle missions, one of which brought the photovoltaic arrays, giant solar panels, which provide the station with most of its power. Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev became the first humans to adjust to long-term life in low orbit, circling the Earth roughly 15.5 times a day and exercising at least two hours a day in order to offset the muscle atrophy that occurs in low gravity.

On March 10, the space shuttle Discovery brought three new residents to relieve Expedition 1, who landed back on Earth at the Kennedy Space Center on March 21. Since then, humans have continuously resided on the ISS, with plans to continue until at least 2030. 236 people from 18 nations have visited the station and a number of new modules have been added, many for the purpose of research into biology, material sciences, the feasibility of further human space travel and more.

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