01010613 This Day In History, June 13

81: The Roman Emperor Titus (reigned 79-81) died at age 42. As a military commander before succeeding his father Vespasian, it was Titus who inflicted the prophesied destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD (see A History Of Jerusalem: Titus And The Zealots and What Did Jesus Christ Say About Those Stones?).

122: Construction began of Hadrian's Wall in Britain during the time the island was under Roman occupation (see A History Of Jerusalem: Hadrian and Simon bar Kokhba). Named after the emperor Hadrian (reigned 117-138), parts of the 120 kilometer (75 mile) wall remain visible today.

313: The Edict of Milan, signed by Constantine the Great and co-emperor Valerius Licinius granted "religious freedom" throughout the Roman Empire i.e. the "freedom" to submit to Constantine's perverted version of Christianity, including worship on the Roman/Babylonian "Sun Day" (see Constantine's Crusades In History And Prophecy and Why Observe The True Sabbath?; see also A History Of Jerusalem: Constantine and Muhammad).

1249: Alexander III was crowned as King of the Scots.

1321: Italian playwright Dante Alighieri died. His farce Divine Comedy was the inspiration for much of the Vatican's development of the doctrine of an ever-burning hell fire and the non-existent Purgatory.

1515: King Francis of France battled the Swiss army under Cardinal Matthias Schiner at Marignano in northern Italy.

1525: The monk Martin Luther married the nun Katharina von Bora, thereby violating the Church of Rome's celibacy rule. Luther became known as a protestant reformer, although he maintained most of the antichrist doctrines of Rome (e.g. Sunday; see Antichristians, Friends Of Jesus and Why Observe The True Sabbath?), as do most of the "Protestant" churches to this day.

1549: Pope Paul III ended the first session of the Council of Bologna.

1609: Henry Hudson entered what would later be named New York harbor and claimed the area for Holland.

1611: Fabricius discovered sunspots.

1625: King Charles I of England married Henrietta Maria, Princess of France.

1740: During the Siege of St. Augustine, Georgia (named after King George II) provincial governor James Oglethorpe began an attempt to take Spanish Florida for England.

1833: Robert Lyon, a law student, became the last (known) person to be killed in a duel in Ontario. He was killed by former friend (obviously) and fellow law student, John Wilson, who was acquitted of murder and later went on to become a Member of Parliament and a judge.

1871: A hurricane killed 300 people in Labrador.

1886: A fire devastated most of Vancouver, British Columbia.

1893: U.S. President Grover Cleveland underwent surgery to remove a large, cancerous portion of his jaw. The operation was not reported to the public until 1917, nine years after his death.

1898: The Yukon Territory of Canada was established, 2 years after the Klondike gold discovery. Dawson City was named the capital. During the goldrush, Dawson City was the largest city north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg.

1922: The highest recorded shade temperature, 58 degrees Celsius / 136 degrees Fahrenheit, was recorded at Al Aziziyah, Libya.

1934: Adolf Hitler (see Presidential Quotes On War, Terrorism, Religion) and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini met in Venice, Italy. Mussolini later described Hitler as "a silly little monkey."

1942: During the Second World War, the German army began its all-out attack on Stalingrad against stiff Soviet resistance.

1944: During the Second World War, Germany launched its V-1 jet-powered bombing campaign on Britain that would kill 5,479 people and injure almost 16,000.

1971: The New York Times began publishing "The Pentagon Papers," a stolen collection of secret Vietnam War documents (a "Wikileaks" of that day). It was from that publication of embarrassing information that President Richard Nixon created the "plumbers," a group of White House operatives whose assigned task was to prevent further "leaks" - something that they disastrously failed to do when they committed the Watergate break-in that resulted in the fall of the Nixon presidency.

1978: Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon (see also A History Of Jerusalem: War And Peace and Israel's Wars In The Twentieth Century).

1983: Pioneer 10 became the first man-made object to leave the Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune (the pagan-god name that scientists gave to the planet).

1997: A jury sentenced U.S. terrorist Timothy McVeigh to death for his part in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

2000: At the insistence of Pope John Paul II, the President of Italy pardoned Mehmet Ali Agca, 43, 19 years after shooting the pope in 1981. Agca was then returned to Turkey to complete a 10 year sentence for murder, of which he had served only 158 days before escaping.

2002: The U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to "legally" increase and further develop its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - while demanding that others reduce their weapons of mass destruction inventory.

2007: The Al Askari Mosque in Iraq was bombed, as it was the previous year.

2010: A capsule of the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, containing particles of the asteroid 25143 Itokawa, returned to Earth.