WEDDINGS, EXCHANGE AND COMMUNICATION

A couple of items and communications for the 10^th February.

Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha  were married on 10^th  February 1840, in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace, London. Victoria was besotted. She spent the evening after their wedding lying down with a headache, but wrote ecstatically in her diary:

“…I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert ... his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! ... to be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!...”

An example of performance writing which even Mills & Boon would have been proud to publish.

On the 10^th February 1962, American U2 spy-plane pilot Gary Powers was exchanged along with American student Frederic Pryor in a well publicized spy swap for Soviet KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher (aka Rudolf Abel), a Soviet colonel who was caught by the FBI and put in jail for espionage, at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, Germany.

Powers

FBI mugshot of Rudolf Abel

Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident. Powers received a cold reception on his return home. Initially, he was criticized for having failed to activate his aircraft’s self-destruct charge to destroy the camera, photographic film, and related classified parts of his aircraft before his capture. He was also criticized for not using an optional CIA-issued "suicide pin" to kill himself. After being debriefed extensively by the CIA, Lockheed, and the Air Force, on March 6, 1962, Powers appeared before a Senate Armed Services Select Committee hearing chaired by Senator Richard Russell and including Senators Prescott Bush and Barry Goldwater Sr. It was determined that Powers had followed orders, had not divulged any critical information to the Soviets, and had conducted himself “as a fine young man under dangerous circumstances.”

Pryor

Frederic L. Pryor is a Senior Research Scholar of Economics at Swarthmore College. In August, 1961, Pryor was arrested and held without charge by the East German police. He had been taking graduate courses in East European studies at the Free University of West Berlin since 1959. Frederic L. Pryor is a microeconomist who has specialized in the comparative study of economic systems. In recent years, he has focused on problems of the changing structure of the American economy. Pryor has worked as an economic advisor in Ukraine and Latvia, was employed as a consultant to the World Bank in Africa, served as a Research Director to the Pennsylvania Tax Commission, and has been a Research Associate at both the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Here are a couple of videos about the incident and a bit of CIA propaganda about the capture of Rudolf Abel

And in keeping with U.S. and Russian swops, on the 10^th February 2009, at 16:56 GMT, Kosmos 2251 (a retired Strela-military-satellite) and Iridium 33 (a U.S. Iridium communications satellite) collided, resulting in the destruction of both spacecraft. NASA reported that a large amount of space debris was produced by the collision.

Iridium Satellite

Map of collision