A number of events affecting
global communication occurred on the 22nd
April.
Spain and Portugal divided
up the world. The Treaty of Zaragoza,
also referred to as the capitulation of
Zaragoza was a peace treaty between Spain and Portugal signed on 22nd April 1529 by King John III and the
Emperor Charles V, in the city of Zaragoza. The treaty defined the areas of
Spanish and Portuguese influence in Asia to resolve the "Moluccas
issue", when both kingdoms claimed those islands for themselves, considering
it within their exploration area established by the Treaty of Tordesillas in
1494. The Treaty of Zaragoza stated the continuation of the meridian of
Tordesillas in the opposite hemisphere, 297.5 marine leagues (about 1,487
kilometres / 892 miles) east of the Maluku. The Philippines stood on the
Spanish side, while the Maluku Islands were provided by Spain to Portugal over
the payment of 350,000 gold ducats. The treaty also had a safeguard stating
that, if at any time the emperor wished to restore the deal, the sale would be
undone and each "will have the right and the action as that is now."
This never happened. Posterior measurements proved that, according to the exact
anti-meridian of Tordesillas, the Maluku and also the Philippines were in the
Portuguese hemisphere.
The first Earth Day was celebrated on
the 22nd April 1970. Earth Day is a day early each year on
which events are held worldwide to increase awareness and appreciation of the Earth’s
natural environment's. Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day
Network, and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year. In 2009, the United
Nations designated 22nd April
International Mother Earth Day. Earth Day is planned for 22nd April in all years at least through
2015.
The name and concept of Earth Day was
allegedly pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San
Francisco. Earth Day was first observed on 21st March, 1970, the
first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature's equipoise
was later sanctioned in a Proclamation signed by Secretary General U Thant at
the United Nations where it is observed each year.
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| McConnell |
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| Nelson |
About the same time a separate Earth Day
was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental
teach-in first held on 22nd April
1970. While this Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization
launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970,
took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. Numerous
communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on
environmental issues.
In the United Kingdom, the Big Number Change, which took place on the 22nd April 2000, was an update of
telephone dialling codes in the UK in response to the rapid late-1990s growth
of telecommunications and impending exhaustion of numbers. The change greatly
expanded the pool of available numbers while helping to retain 'local dialling'
(the ability to dial local numbers directly, without needing to dial an area
code first). The change affected the dialling codes assigned to Cardiff.
Coventry, London, Northern Ireland, Portsmouth and Southampton, culminating in
a large switch on 22nd April 2000. In
addition to new area/city codes for many parts of the UK, the switch was also
coupled with a move to eight-digit local numbers, the adjustment of all mobile
phone numbers in the UK to the 07 prefix and the alteration of many
non-geographic codes to the new 08 range.
The 100th anniversary
celebration, however, belongs to Правда. It was not
without its problems in its early years.
The Pravda newspaper
started on the 22nd April 1912 in St.
Petersburg. It was converted from a weekly Zvezda. It did not arrive in Moscow until 1918. During the
Cold War, Pravda was well known in the West for its pronouncements as
the official voice of Soviet Communism. (Similarly Izvestia was the official voice of the Soviet government.)
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) had split into
Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, with the Bolsheviks eventually becoming the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
After the breakdown of the
January 1910 compromise, the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP started publishing
a Saint Petersburg-based legal weekly, Zvezda, in December 1910. When
the Bolsheviks formally broke away from the other factions at their conference
in Prague in January 1912, they also decided to convert Zvezda, which
was by then published three times a week, into a daily.
The Bolsheviks finally
realized their plan when the first issue of Pravda was published in
Saint Petersburg on 22nd April 1912.
It continued publishing legally, although subject to government censorship,
until it was shut down in July 1914 by the government at the beginning of World
War I; however, the pure and simple truth is that due to police harassment, the
newspaper had to change its name eight times in just two years.
▪
Рабочая
правда (Rabochaya
Pravda, Worker’s Truth)
▪
Северная
правда (Severnaya
Pravda Northern Truth)
▪
Правда
Труда (Pravda Truda,
Labor’s Truth)
▪
За
правду (Za Pravdu,
For Truth)
▪
Пролетарская
правда (Proletarskaya
Pravda, Proletarian Truth)
▪
Путь
правды (Put' Pravdy,
The Way of Truth)
▪
Рабочий (Rabochy, The Worker)
▪
Tрудовая
правда (Trudovaya
Pravda, Labor’s Truth)
The
paper did survive until it was closed down in 1991 by decree of the then
president Boris Yeltsin. Many of the staff founded a new paper with the same
name, which is now a tabloid-style Russian news source. There is an
unaffiliated Internet-based newspaper, Pravda Online, run by former
Pravda newspaper employees. A number of other newspapers have also been called Pravda,
most notably Komsomolskaya Pravda, formerly the official newspaper of the now
defunct Komsomol (Communist Union of
Youth) and currently the best-selling tabloid in Russia.
As Oscar Wilde reminded us earlier in 1895, “The
truth is rarely pure and never simple”
This video shows a bit of the history over the last 100 years. The sound is a bit doggy at the beginning.
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