The Cotswold Olimpick Games is an annual public celebration of games and sports held near
Chipping Campden, in the
Cotswolds of England. They probably began in 1612, and have continued on and off since (1636 depiction shown). They were started by a local lawyer,
Robert Dover, with the approval of
King James. Events included horse-racing,
coursing with hounds, running, dancing, sledgehammer throwing, fighting with swords, and wrestling. By the time of James's death in 1625, many Puritan landowners had forbidden their workers to attend, and the outbreak of the
English Civil War in 1642 brought the Games to an end. Revived after the
Restoration of 1660, they gradually degenerated into a drunk and disorderly country festival. They ended again in 1852, when the
common land on which they had been staged was partitioned and
enclosed. Since 1966 the Games have been held each year on the Friday after
Spring Bank Holiday. Events have included the
tug of war,
gymkhana,
shin-kicking,
dwile flonking, motor cycle scrambling, judo, piano smashing, and
morris dancing. The
British Olympic Association has recognised the Cotswold Olimpick Games as "the first stirrings of Britain's Olympic beginnings". (
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1935 – A 7.7
Mw earthquake struckBalochistan in the
British Raj, now part of Pakistan, killing anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people.
1981 – An organized mob of police and government-sponsored paramilitias began burning the public library in
Jaffna, Sri Lanka, destroying over 97,000 items in one of the most violent examples of ethnic
biblioclasm of the 20th century.
The Deutsche Bank Twin Towers is a twin tower
skyscraper complex in Frankfurt, Germany, which serves as the headquarters of
Deutsche Bank. Each rising to 155 metres (509 ft) in height, the towers began construction in 1979.
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