U.S.-Russia detente ends


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Year
1980
Month Day
January 02

On January 2, 1980, in a strong reaction to the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter asks the Senate to postpone action on the SALT II nuclear weapons treaty and recalls the U.S. ambassador to Moscow. These actions sent a message that the age of detente and the friendlier diplomatic and economic relations that were established between the United States and Soviet Union during President Richard Nixon’s administration (1969-74) had ended.

Carter feared that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in which an estimated 30,000 combat troops entered that nation and established a puppet government, would threaten the stability of strategic neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan and could lead to the USSR gaining control over much of the world’s oil supplies. The Soviet actions were labeled “a serious threat to peace” by the White House. Carter asked the Senate to shelve ratification talks on SALT II, the nuclear arms treaty that he and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev had already signed, and the president called U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas J. Watson back to Washington for “consultation,” in an effort to let the Kremlin know that military intervention in Afghanistan was unacceptable.

When the Soviets refused to withdraw from Afghanistan, America halted certain key exports to the USSR, including grain and high technology, and boycotted the 1980 summer Olympics, which were held in Moscow. The United States also began to covertly subsidize anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars to Afghanistan to arm and train the mujahedeen rebel forces that were battling the Soviets. This tactic was successful in helping to drive out the Soviets, but it also gave rise to the oppressive Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist organization.

In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, who favored a more aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy. Reagan dubbed the USSR the “evil empire” and believed it was America’s responsibility to save the world from Soviet repression. He dramatically increased U.S. defense spending and ramped up the nuclear arms race with the Soviets, whose faltering economy ultimately prevented them from keeping pace. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

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Rare Bugatti found in British garage


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Year
2009
Month Day
January 02

On January 2, 2009, media outlets report that a rare unrestored 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante Coupe has been found in the garage of a British doctor. A month later, on February 7, the car sold at a Paris auction for some $4.4 million.

The black two-seater, one of just 17 57S Atalante Coupes ever made by Bugatti, had been owned by English orthopedic surgeon Harold Carr since 1955. Carr, who died in 2007, reportedly had kept the rare vehicle parked in his garage since the early 1960s and hadn’t driven it in five decades. The car was built in May 1937 and originally owned by Francis Richard Henry Penn Curzon, the 5th Earl Howe. Curzon was also the first president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club and a winner of the 24 Hour Le Mans race.

When it was built, the 57S Atalante Coupe was capable of reaching speeds of more than 120 miles per hour at a time when the average car couldn’t do more than 50 miles per hour. It was also notable for its low-slung frame and V-shaped radiator and featured pig-skin upholstery. At the time of the auction, Carr’s car was said to be in good condition and had 26,284 miles on its odometer.

The Bugatti car company was founded in 1909 by Italian-born Ettore Bugatti (1881-1947) in present-day Molsheim, France, and became known for producing expensive, cutting-edge sports cars and racing cars. From the time of its founding until the 1940s, the company built fewer than 8,000 cars. Following the death of Ettore Bugatti in 1947, the company went into decline and changed hands several times. In 1998, Volkswagen bought the rights to build cars under the Bugatti name. In 2009, the company introduced the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, a sports car convertible which was capable of speeds of some 253 miles per hour and carried a price tag of more than $2 million. The Veyron could reach 60 mph in under 2.5 seconds.

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President Nixon signs national speed limit into law


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Year
1974
Month Day
January 02

On January 2, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, setting a new national maximum speed limit.

Prior to 1974, individual states set speed limits within their boundaries and highway speed limits across the country ranged from 40 mph to 80 mph. The U.S. and other industrialized nations enjoyed easy access to cheap Middle Eastern oil from 1950 to 1972, but the Arab-Israeli conflict changed that dramatically in 1973. Arab members of the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) protested the West’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War by stopping oil shipments to the United States, Japan and Western Europe. OPEC also flexed its new-found economic muscle by quadrupling oil prices, placing a choke-hold on America’s oil-hungry consumers and industries. The embargo had a global impact, sending the U.S. and European economies into recession. As part of his response to the embargo, President Nixon signed a federal law lowering all national highway speed limits to 55 mph. The act was intended to force Americans to drive at speeds deemed more fuel-efficient, thereby curbing the U.S. appetite for foreign oil. With it, Nixon ushered in a policy of fuel conservation and rationing not seen since World War II.

The act also prohibited the Department of Transportation from approving or funding any projects within states that did not comply with the new speed limit. Most states quietly adjusted their speed limits, though Western states, home to the country’s longest, straightest and most monotonous rural highways, only grudgingly complied. Even after OPEC lifted the embargo in March 1974, drivers continued to face high gas prices and attempted to conserve fuel by buying revolutionary Japanese economy cars. For many, a desire for fuel-efficient automobiles became the standard until the trend toward gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) emerged in the 1990s. In 1987, Congress authorized states to reset speed limits within their borders, but proponents of the national maximum speed limit law claimed it lowered automobile-related fatalities, prompting Congress to keep it on the books until finally repealing it on November 28, 1995.

Today speed limits across the country vary between 35 and 40 mph in congested urban areas and 75 mph on long stretches of rural highway. U.S. drivers now drive almost as fast as their European counterparts, who average between 75 and 80 mph on the highway. On some roads in Italy, it is legal to drive as fast as 95 mph.

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Author Stephen Crane’s boat sinks


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Year
1897
Month Day
January 02

On January 2, 1897, American writer Stephen Crane survives the sinking of The Commodore off the coast of Florida. He will turn the harrowing adventure into his classic short story “The Open Boat” (1897).

The 25-year-old writer had gained international fame with the publication of his novel The Red Badge of Courage in 1896. A Civil War story told from the soldier’s point of view, the novel originally appeared as a syndicated newspaper series.

Crane, the youngest of 14 children, was born in 1871 and grew up in New York and New Jersey. He became a journalist in New York, working short stints for various newspapers and living in near poverty. Immersed in the hand-to-mouth life of poor New York, Crane closely observed the characters around him, and in 1893, at age 23, he self-published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, about a poor girl’s decline into prostitution and suicide. The book was a critical success but failed to sell well. He turned his attention to more popular topics and began writing The Red Badge of Courage.

After the book’s success, the same newspaper syndicate dispatched Crane to write about the West and Mexico, and in 1897 Crane headed to Cuba to cover the insurrection against Spain. On the way there, he met his future lifelong companion, Cora Howard Taylor, the proprietress of a rundown hotel where he was staying. After The Commodore sank, Crane and four of his shipmates spent a day in a 10-foot lifeboat before they reached Daytona Beach. Crane published an account in a New York newspaper five days later, and “The Open Boat” was published in Scribner’s magazine the following June. Crane later covered the war between Greece and Turkey, and settled in England, where he befriended Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James.

Crane contracted tuberculosis in his late 20s. Cora Howard Taylor nursed him while he wrote furiously in an attempt to pay off his debts. He exhausted himself and exacerbated his condition. He died in June 1900, at the age of 28.

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Folk group The Weavers are banned by NBC after refusing to sign a loyalty oath


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Year
1962
Month Day
January 02

The Weavers, one of the most significant popular-music groups of the postwar era, saw their career nearly destroyed during the Red Scare of the early 1950s. Even with anti-communist fervor in decline by the early 1960s, the Weavers’ leftist politics were used against them as late as January 2, 1962, when the group’s appearance on The Jack Paar Show was cancelled over their refusal to sign an oath of political loyalty.

The importance of the Weavers to the folk revival of the late 1950s cannot be overstated. Without the group that Pete Seeger founded with Lee Hays in Greenwich Village in 1948, there would likely be no Bob Dylan, not to mention no Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary. The Weavers helped spark a tremendous resurgence in interest in American folk traditions and folk songs when they burst onto the popular scene with “Goodnight Irene,” a #1 record for 13 weeks in the summer and fall of 1950. The Weavers sold millions of copies of innocent, beautiful and utterly apolitical records like “Midnight Special” and “On Top of Old Smoky” that year.

And then it came to light that members of the group had openly embraced the pacifism, internationalism and pro-labor sympathies of the Communist Party during the 1930s. When word of their political past spread, the backlash was swift. The Weavers’ planned television show was canceled, the group was placed under FBI surveillance and Seeger and Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Weavers lost their recording contract with Decca in 1951, and by 1953, unable to book most concert venues and banned from appearing on television and radio, they disbanded.

The Weavers enjoyed a significant comeback in the late 1950s, but the group never shook its right-wing antagonists. On the afternoon of January 2, 1962, in advance of a scheduled appearance on The Jack Paar Show, the Weavers were told by NBC officials that their appearance would be canceled if they would not sign a statement disavowing the Communist party. Every member of the Weavers refused to sign.

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Sherry Lansing named first female studio production head


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Year
1980
Month Day
January 02

“Former Model Named Head of Fox Productions” ran the headline in the January 2, 1980, issue of the New York Times, over an article announcing that Sherry Lansing had been selected to lead the production department at 20th Century Fox. After signing a three-year contract at a minimum of $300,000 per year (plus the possibility of hefty bonuses based on box-office returns), Lansing became not only the first woman to head production at a major movie studio, but also one of the highest-paid female executives in any industry.

Though Lansing later expressed irritation at the prominent mentions of her modeling career in the press coverage of her promotion, there was no doubt that she had an unusual resume for a top studio executive. Just 35 years old at the time, the Northwestern University graduate was a former high school math teacher who was later featured in television commercials for Max Factor hair products. A role in the John Wayne movie Rio Lobo hooked Lansing on the film industry, and she landed a job as a script reader for an independent producer. Rising through the ranks from executive story editor to executive vice-president of creative affairs at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, she left that studio for Columbia Pictures, where she rose to vice-president of production and later senior VP.

Lansing’s appointment came after months of uncertainty at 20th Century Fox. President Alan Ladd Jr., who had been at the reins for the studio’s 1977 mega-hit Star Wars, had resigned in July amid disagreements with studio chairman Dennis Stanfill. When most of the company’s top brass also left in the fallout, the new vice-chairman and chief operating officer Alan Hirschfield, the former president of Columbia Pictures, brought on new people from his old studio. Lansing, who had worked as a senior production executive on Columbia’s critically acclaimed hits Kramer vs. Kramer (which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture) and The China Syndrome (starring Michael Douglas), was one of these hires. As Hirschfield told The New York Times, “The latest Motion Picture Association of America report shows that the audience is still trending down in age. Sixty percent of the audience is between the ages of 14 and 24. Sherry can attract the younger creative movie makers who can make pictures that attract the younger audience.”

In her three years at Fox, Lansing counted Chariots of Fire, The Verdict and Taps among her successes. She left the studio in 1983 to form a production venture with Stanley Jaffe; their union produced Fatal Attraction (1987), The Accused (1988), Black Rain (1989), School Ties (1992) and Indecent Proposal (1993). After Jaffe became president of Paramount Communication, Lansing took over the chairmanship of Paramount Pictures in 1992. During her 12-year tenure there, the studio had an impressive run of hits, including the blockbuster hits Forrest Gump (1994), Braveheart (1995) and Titanic (1997), all winners of the Oscar for Best Picture. The latter two were co-produced with Fox.

Lansing left Paramount in 2004, after the company was bought by Viacom. She subsequently formed her own foundation, dedicated to raising funds for cancer research, and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 79th Academy Awards in 2007.

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The Yorkshire Ripper is apprehended


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Year
1981
Month Day
January 02

The so-called Yorkshire Ripper is finally caught by British police, ending one of the largest manhunts in history. For five years, investigators had pursued every lead in an effort to stop the serial killer who terrorized Northern England, but the end came out of pure happenstance. Peter Sutcliffe was spotted in a stolen car with a prostitute and arrested by Sergeant Robert Ring. Sutcliffe asked to urinate behind a bush before being taken into custody. When Ring later returned to the scene, he found a hammer and knife, the Yorkshire Ripper’s weapons of choice, behind the shrubbery. Sutcliffe confessed when confronted with this evidence.

Peter Sutcliffe’s first victim was Wilma McCann, who was beaten about the head with a hammer and stabbed mulitpletimes on October 30, 1975. Initially, he focused his attacks almost exclusively on prostitutes, killing seven young women in Northern England between February 1977 and May 1978. Many of the victims were mutilated after they were killed.

As part of the manhunt, authorities interviewed more than 250,000 people and searchedthousands ofhomes. Sutcliffe himself was interviewed nine times during the investigation but always convinced detectives that he wasn’t involved. In 1979, a tape recording purportedly from the Yorkshire Ripper was sent to the police, who were sidetracked by what later turned out to be a hoax.

The public really began to panic when the Yorkshire Ripper stopped going after prostitutes and started targeting college students. When Peter Sutcliffe was finally convicted, after an unsuccessful insanity defense, he had killed 13 women, far more than his namesake, Jack the Ripper. Sutcliffe received a sentence of life in prison.

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Carter reacts to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan


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Year
1980
Month Day
January 02

In a very strong reaction to the December 1979 Soviet military intervention into Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter requests that the Senate postpone action on the SALT-II nuclear weapons treaty and recalls the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. These actions indicated that the U.S.-Soviet relationship had been severely damaged by the Russian action in Afghanistan and that the age of détente had ended.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the establishment by the Soviets of a puppet government in that nation, brought U.S. relations with the Soviet Union to the breaking point. Carter’s press secretary, Jodie Powell, called the Russian action “a serious threat to peace.” On January 2, he announced that the Carter administration had asked the Senate to postpone deliberations on SALT-II, the complicated treaty dealing with nuclear arms. Carter also recalled U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. home, ostensibly for “consultation.” As Carter administration officials made clear, however, this action was intended to send a very strong message to the Soviets that military intervention in Afghanistan was unacceptable. In addition, the Carter administration was thinking about new trade restrictions against the Soviets and a boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics, which were to be held in Moscow.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan marked a critical turning point in U.S.-Soviet relations. With the action, the age of détente and the closer diplomatic and economic relations that were established during the presidency of Richard Nixon came to an end. Carter lost the election of 1980 to Ronald Reagan, who promised—and delivered—an even more vigorous anticommunist foreign policy.

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Congress publishes the Tory Act


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Year
1776
Month Day
January 02

The Continental Congress publishes the “Tory Act” resolution on January 2, 1776, which describes how colonies should handle those Americans who remain loyal to the British and King George.

The act called on colonial committees to indoctrinate those “honest and well-meaning, but uninformed people” by enlightening them as to the “origin, nature and extent of the present controversy.” The Congress remained “fully persuaded that the more our right to the enjoyment of our ancient liberties and privileges is examined, the more just and necessary our present opposition to ministerial tyranny will appear.”

However, those “unworthy Americans,” who had “taken part with our oppressors” with the aim of gathering “ignominious rewards,” were left to the relevant bodies, some ominously named “councils of safety,” to decide their fate. Congress merely offered its “opinion” that dedicated Tories “ought to be disarmed, and the more dangerous among them either kept in safe custody, or bound with sufficient sureties to their good behavior.”

The lengths Congress and lesser colonial bodies would go to in order to repress Loyalists took a darker tone later in the act. Listing examples of the “execrable barbarity with which this unhappy war has been conducted on the part of our enemies,” Congress vowed to act “whenever retaliation may be necessary” although it might prove a “disagreeable task.”

In the face of such hostility, some Loyalists chose not to remain in the American colonies. During the war, between 60,000 and 70,000 free persons and 20,000 slaves abandoned the rebellious 13 colonies for other destinations within the British empire. The Revolution effectively created two countries: Patriots formed the new United States, while fleeing Loyalists populated Canada.

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