Election Day in the United States. English settlers began voting almost as soon as they landed on American soil, the Jamestown colony. In 1607 they held an election to select a leader for the colony.
The first presidential election in the US in 1789 at a time when only white men over the age of 21 who owned property had the right to vote; about 6 percent of the population were able to go to the polls.

Thanksgiving, the day when millions of us sit down to turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, commemorating the celebratory dinner that took place in 1621 between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians near Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims had endured a very harsh ocean voyage on The Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock. They were ill prepared for winter. Most of them perished or became severely ill during their first winter. And this autumn feast took place.
Probably it was not turkey, probably not mashed potatoes. Probably they ate goose or swan or seal.
The idea of the fall harvest feast was common among ancient peoples, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans and also among native Americans, who had a long tradition of feasting and celebration of the harvest.

And on this day in 1952 the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb; detonating the world's first thermo nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, on a small atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
"One of the most momentous events in the history of science. The most powerful explosion ever witnessed by human eye and this is the significance of the moment, this is the first full scale test of a hydrogen device. If the reaction goes we are in the thermo nuclear era. For the sake of all of us, and for the sake of our country, I know that you join me and wishing this expedition well."
"It is now 30 seconds to zero time."
The test gave the United States a short lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
"Three, two, one"
Following this successful Soviet detonation of an atomic device back in September of 1949, the United States accelerated its program to develop the next stage in atomic weaponry - a thermo nuclear bomb, popularly known as a hydrogen bomb. This new weapon was approximately 1'000 times more powerful than conventional nuclear devices.
Video of first US hydrogen bomb

A transition to clean energy sources will not only save lives but will also save money, said the World Health Organization.
WHO says that 99 per cent of the world’s population breathes outdoor air that exceeds its air quality guidelines and leads to seven million premature deaths each year.
Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, Head of the Climate Change and Health Unit at WHO said that the health benefits of investing in renewable energy, which is currently the cheapest energy source, are undeniable.
He said that clean energy, particularly solar panels, will not only improve public health but will also end up costing considerably less than burning fossil fuels.

It's the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes one of the Catholic conspirators, who meant to blow up Parliament in 1605. And it was on this day November 5, 1605, he was attending to the 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellar under the House of Lords, when the authorities came in and arrested him.
He was sentenced to death for treason. On the day of his execution, he jumped from the gallows, breaking his neck and dying instantly and avoiding the more painful execution of being hanged, drawn, and quartered.
So on this day they shoot off fireworks in Britain and they burn Guy Fawkes in effegy.

A new study carried out in the West African nation of Mali found that an experimental drug protected adults against malaria for at least six months. The one-dose drug is the latest possible treatment for the disease spread by mosquitos.
Malaria killed more than 620,000 people in 2020 and sickened 241 million. They were mainly children under the age of 5 in Africa.
The World Health Organization is releasing the first malaria vaccine for children. But it is just 30 percent effective and requires four doses.
The new study tested a very different idea. The drug gives people a large dose of lab-made malaria-fighting antibodies. The vaccine depends on the immune system to make enough of those same infection-blockers after vaccination.
During malaria season in some places in Mali, people are bitten by infected mosquitoes on an average of twice a day.
The experimental antibody was created by researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. It is given intravenously, or directly into the veins. The drug would be difficult to release to a large amount of people. But scientists are also testing a shot version of the treatment, which would be easier to give out.
The antibody works by breaking the life cycle of the parasite, which is spread through mosquito bites. It targets parasites early before they enter the liver, where they can grow and multiply. The drug was created from an antibody taken from a volunteer who received a malaria vaccine.

"The clock is ticking", and humankind is currently losing “the fight of our lives” said the UN Secretary-General on Monday, addressing delegates on the first day of COP27, the UN Climate Change Conference, in Egypt.
António Guterres warned that "we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator."
He said the planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible and that any hope of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees means achieving global net zero emissions by 2050.
He called on all G20 countries to act now and said that developed countries must take the lead.
The Secretary-General called for a Climate Solidarity Pact between developed and emerging economies, which would see wealthier countries and international financial institutions providing support to help emerging economies speed up the transition to clean energy.
Mr. Guterres said that the two largest economies – the US and China – have a particular responsibility to make the Pact a reality, adding that humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.

An ancient Christian site has been discovered on an island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, officials announced recently. The religious complex, a monastery, could date to a time before the spread of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula.
The monastery is providing researchers a lot of information about early Christianity in the Persian Gulf area. It is the second such monastery found in the Emirates, dating back as many as 1,400 years.
The two monasteries became lost to history in the sands of time.
As Islam spread in the area, experts believe Christians slowly became Muslim. Today, Christians remain a minority across the wider Middle East.
The monastery sits on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, an emirate some 50 kilometers northeast of Dubai. The island has a series of sandy areas coming off of it like fingers. On one, to the island’s northeast, researchers discovered the monastery.
Samples found in the monastery’s foundation date between 534 and 656. Islam’s Prophet Muhammad was born around 570 and died in 632.
Seen from above, the monastery's floor plan suggests early Christian worshippers prayed within a small church. Rooms within the monastery appear to hold a baptismal area, as well as an oven for baking bread or wafers for communion rites. Another area also likely held an altar and an installation for communion wine.
Next to the monastery sits a second building with four rooms, likely around an open area known as a courtyard. This was possibly the home of an early church leader such as an abbot or even a bishop.
Ancient Christian monastery found off coast of United Arab Emirates

It was on this day in 1895 X-rays were discovered by physicist Wilhelm Röntgen. He kept them a secret for a year and then the X-rays were used to set the broken arm of a young boy in New Hampshire.
(Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901.)

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1942, where he served as assistant managing editor and associate editor for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in biochemistry.
While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army and the experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. Captured by the Wehrmacht troops on December 14, 1944 he was imprisoned in Dresden. There Vonnegut witnessed the February 13/14, 1945 bombing of Dresden, which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive. The Germans put him then to work gathering bodies for mass burial. This experience formed the core of one of his most famous works, Slaughterhouse-Five.
After returning from World War II he married his childhood sweetheart, but the couple separated in 1970.
Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays. On January 2000 he was hospitalized for smoke inhalation after a fire at his home. Vonnegut had tried to extinguish the flames with a blanket.
Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, New York after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall at his home.

Archeologists have discovered more than twenty bronze statues from ancient Roman times in Tuscany, Italy over the past few weeks. They said the statues were well protected in thermal baths and are calling the discovery "exceptional."
The statues were found in the town of San Casciano dei Bagni, about 160 kilometers north of Rome. It is a place where archaeologists have explored the ancient ruins of a bathhouse for the past three years.
Jacopo Tabolli is a professor at the University for Foreigners in Siena, Italy. He is the lead archaeologist on the project. He told Reuters, "It is a very significant, exceptional finding."
The hot waters of San Casciano helped to protect the statues, which Tabolli said were, “almost like as on the day they were immersed.”
There were 24 large statues and several smaller ones. And they were also covered with nearly 6,000 bronze, silver, and gold coins.
Tabolli said that the use of bronze for the statues was unusual. At that time, statues were normally made from terracotta or red clay from the earth. This suggests that the bronze statues were made by a high-level group of people.
Italy's Culture Ministry said that the statues come from the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. That period was a time of great change in Tuscany as government rule moved from Etruscan to Roman.
Many conflicts and cultural exchanges happened during this time. The bathhouse of San Casciano was a safe place for those escaping unrest and war to share culture and language, the ministry said.
Bronze Statues Discovered After 2,000 Years

A lack of testing facilities and poor access to healthcare are some of the reasons that less than half of people living with diabetes in the African region know that they have the condition.
Analysis released on Monday by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that a lack of awareness about diabetes raises the risk of severe illness and death. This potentially worsens the situation in the region which already has the world’s highest mortality rates due to the disease.
Currently, 24 million adults are living with diabetes in Africa. The figure is projected to rise by 129 percent, to 55 million by 2045.
Premature deaths from diabetes in the region stands at 58 per cent, higher than the global average of 48 per cent. In addition, only one in two people living in Africa with type 1 diabetes has access to insulin treatment.
WHO says that the rising prevalence of the disease is a wakeup call to reinforce healthcare, improve diagnosis and access to life-saving diabetes medicines, and prioritize diabetes as a major health challenge.

It's the birthday of the author Chinua Achebe, born Ogidi, Nigeria in 1930. His parents were evangelical protestants and when he went to university he gave up his birthname, Albert, and he took his Ebo middle name Chinua. He joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service when he was 24 years old and it was then he wrote his first novel "Things Fall Apart."
Which is still today the most widely read book of African literature. Achebe describes himself as a cultural nationalist, but nevertheless he writes his books in English, which he has been criticized for.
He said colonialism for all of its evils at least gives divers communities a language with which to talk to one another. And therefore they can reach people all across Nigeria, all the different small language groups.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: The Dead Sea is ancient. The history of its salty, therapeutic waters goes back to the Bible. But this natural wonder is rapidly drying up - even changing the land around it. NPR's Daniel Estrin took to the water recently to explore what's being lost and what it will take to prevent more destruction.
DANIEL ESTRIN: The Dead Sea is magic. It is the lowest exposed place on Earth. It is 10 times saltier than the ocean, so you don't sink in it. You float. The mud and the waters are full of minerals - great, therapeutic for your skin. But the Dead Sea is dying. The lake level is dropping 4 feet every single year. So we've taken this rare boat ride on the Dead Sea to see some of these changes.
JAKY BEN ZAKEN: You're seeing a living disaster in front of your eyes, you know? And since the sea is receding so fast, you know, you see it. It's not that there's a change that you don't see. No, you see it.
ESTRIN: Jaky Ben Zaken (ph) has special Israeli permission to give boat tours here. After all, it's a border zone and shared with Jordan. It's hard for aquatic life to exist in the salty waters - hence the name Dead Sea.
BEN ZAKEN: You see this thing that sticks out there when you go up? Seven years ago, I used to tie my boat there.
ESTRIN: Seven years ago? Wow.
He's pointing to a spot that's now dry land high above us. It's shocking to see - a 4-foot drop every single year. The cause is that, in the last several decades, the freshwater sources that feed into the Dead Sea have been diverted for drinking water and irrigation.
BEN ZAKEN: We are living in the Middle East, OK? So there's not a lot of water.
ESTRIN: Also, Israeli and Jordanian companies pump out and evaporate Dead Sea water to harvest its rich minerals for export. The salty sea is receding so quickly, it leaves behind stunning salt pillars along the shores.

It was on this date in 1970, Douglas Engelbart received a patent for the first computer mouse. He wanted to develop easy, intuitive ways for people to interact with technology. And he made this wooden shell over two metal wheels.
And they called it a mouse because the cord resembled a mouse's tail. The company they worked for licenced the mouse to Apple for just $40,000. Engelbart got no royalties from it.
When and who invented the first computer mouse?

Sea surface temperatures and ocean heat in parts of the southwest Pacific are increasing at more than three times the global average and harming vital ecosystems, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which says that sea level rise poses an existential threat to low-lying islands and their people.
The climate update shows how weather-related disasters are undermining socio-economic development, and threatening health, food and water security.
It provides a snapshot of climate indicators such as temperatures, sea level rise, ocean heat and acidification and extreme weather, alongside risks and impacts.
In 2021, the region reported 57 natural hazards, 93 per cent of which were floods and storms. Overall, 14.3 million people were directly affected by these disasters, causing total economic damage of $ 5.7 billion.
The report highlights big gaps in observing systems and early warning services in the region, which will be one of the priority target areas of a new UN Early Warnings for All initiative.

It's the birthday of Mickey Mouse as we know him today. He had been around before in Disney cartoons, but he was a very different sort of character; he drank, and he smoked, and in many ways he was sort of like an outlaw.
But in the cartoon “Steamboat Willie,” which came out in 1928 on this day, he was a sympathetic character. As Walt Disney said, he was a tiny bit of a mouse, that had something of the wistfulness of Charlie Chaplin. A little fellow trying to do the best he could.
And "Steamboat Willi" had something that was new at the time. It had a soundtrack that was perfectly synchronized to follow the animation.
Watch Steamboat Willie
According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung the very first Mickey Mouse film was "Plane Cracy" also from 1928, but it was unnoticed.
Watch Plane Cracy

To Geneva finally, where young entrepreneurs have been sharing inspiring stories about how they’ve driven positive change for their communities and the environment – and how all of us can do the same.
Speaking at the Youth Activists Summit the six invitees included 22-year-old coral reef restorer, Titouan Bernicot, and 15-year-old anti-cyberbullying app inventor Gitanjali Rao.
Miss Rao, who is also TIME Magazine’s first-ever "Kid of the Year", explained to the audience in the Swiss city that her smartphone app, which is called Kindly, was designed to make bullies reconsider sending or revising potentially hurtful messages online.
"Using machine-learning algorithms, it basically identifies phrases or words that could be considered bullying...when someone’s texting, when someone’s sending an email, even on social media. And it’s able to almost like the spellcheck of bullying, it says, 'This might not be the right thing to say,' but it gives you the chance if you want to send it or not. I read an article that says it only takes seven seconds for a teenager to reevaluate what they’re sending. And we’re going to give them that seven seconds through kindly."

Businessman Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter. And many people have been concerned about the future of the social media company ever since.
Alexandra Roberts is a law and media professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She had this to say: “I have been a really active Twitter user for a long time and I have made fantastic connections there that have helped with my scholarship and with my teaching. And also, I've been able to learn from a lot of other people and I've been able to build a network. And I've gotten a lot of opportunities there as well.”
Since Musk took over, Roberts said, “everything kind of went haywire.” Haywire means something that is out of control or not working.
She noted that Twitter may no longer be as safe a space as in the past. There is less certainty that people are who they say they are.
Shortly after his takeover of Twitter, Musk started a service that permitted anyone willing to pay $8 a month to get a “verified” account. In the past, a verified account was only available to the government, companies, reporters, and well-known figures verified by Twitter.
Someone then set up a verified account with the name of the drug company Eli Lilly. The account sent out a tweet saying its insulin drug which helps people with diabetes would be free. The false tweet forced the real company to post an apology.
Others set up false accounts under the names of well-known politicians and athletes. The service, called Twitter Blue, has since been suspended.

A growing demand for turtles as pets in the United States, Asia, and Europe has led to a rise in poaching. Poaching means to catch or kill an animal illegally.
Wildlife trade experts believe the rise in poaching is adding to the worldwide drop in rare freshwater turtles and tortoises (a kind of turtle that lives on land).
Such concerns have led to proposals to increase protection for freshwater turtles.
Exact numbers on the turtle trade, especially illegal trade, can be hard to find.
Tara Easter, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, studies the trade. She looked at turtle trade data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She estimates that the business export trade for mud turtles in the United States increased from 1,844 in 1999 to nearly 40,000 in 2017. And she estimated that the trade in musk turtles increased from 8,254 in 1999 to more than 281,000 in 2016.

NASA’s Webb Space Telescope is finding bright, early galaxies that, until recently, could not be seen. One of these galaxies may have formed only 350 million years after the Big Bang – the event that explains the beginning of the universe.
The Webb telescope was launched last December. The recently reported findings suggest that stars may have formed sooner during the formation of the universe than scientists believed. Stars might have formed only a few million years after the Big Bang.
An international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detailed the latest findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The report gives more information about two unusually bright galaxies. One is thought to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and the other 450 million years after.
Some researchers report having found galaxies that formed even closer to the creation of the universe, which is estimated to be 13.8 billion years ago. Those candidates, however, have yet to be confirmed, scientists said at a NASA news conference.
Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles, is a chief scientist for Webb’s early release science program. He said the evidence presented so far “is as solid as it gets” for the galaxy believed to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang.
If the findings are confirmed and more early galaxies are out there, Naidu and his team wrote that Webb “will prove highly successful in pushing the cosmic frontier all the way to the brink of the Big Bang.” Brink means very close to something happening.
“When and how the first galaxies formed remains one of the most intriguing questions,” they said in their paper.
NASA’s Jane Rigby is a project scientist with Webb. She noted that these galaxies “were hiding just under the limits of what Hubble could do.”
“They were right there waiting for us,” she told reporters. “So that’s a happy surprise that there are lots of these galaxies to study.”
The $10 billion Webb is the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space. It is in a solar orbit 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. Full science operations began over the summer, and NASA has since released a series of beautiful images of the universe.

Every 11 minutes, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member.
Activists who are calling for change and who help survivors of violence need more support, Mr. Guterres insisted, as he called on governments to increase funding by 50 per cent to women’s rights movements by 2026.
Without positive action from Governments to end the scourge, the UN Secretary-General insisted that the discrimination, violence and abuse that “half of humanity” faces would continue to come “at a steep cost”.

In 1889, the first jukebox was unveiled in a saloon in San Francisco, invented by Louis Glass, who called it the "nickel-in-the-slot phonograph." And you picked up a stethoscopes and listened to the music. Eventually it made the player piano obsolete.
Video of first juke box

A report from the city of Seattle in Washington state said the city lost about 255 hectares of tree covering.
Researchers from France and Australia studied the effect of hotter temperatures and less rain on more than 3,100 trees and plants in 164 cities across 78 countries.
They found about half the trees in the cities were experiencing climate conditions beyond their limits. They also found that by 2050 nearly all trees planted in Australian cities will not survive.
Non-native trees have been brought to cities for some time. However, climate change is causing many tree experts to specifically consider them — a practice called “assisted migration.”
In the city of Bellevue, Washington, experts are growing different kinds of trees specifically for climate change. On city grounds, they are planting baby giant sequoias, just a few centimeters tall.
The giant sequoias are not native to the Pacific Northwest area. But tree managers in this city east of Seattle are planting more sequoias because the trees can deal with the lack of rain and insects.
“Once these trees are established, they grow incredibly fast,” said Rick Bailey of the city’s forest management program.
Planting more non-native trees is also drawing attention to something city tree experts have learned from years of tree deaths: having many different kinds and ages of trees is important to keeping urban forests alive.

A recent study found what could be the earliest known evidence of ancient cooking: the leftovers of a fish dinner from 780,000 years ago.
Cooking helped change our ancestors. It helped fuel our evolution and gave us bigger brains. Later, cooking would become central to the eating celebrations that brought communities together.
Those first cooked meals were far different from today’s food. And in the many, many years in between, humans started not just eating for fuel, but for community.
The feast was a specially prepared meal that brought people together for an event 12,000 years ago in a cave in Israel.
This “first feast” came at an important turning point in human history, right as hunter-gatherers were starting to settle into more permanent living situations. Gathering for special meals may have been a way to build community and reduce tensions now that people lived closer to each other.
Ancient feasts served a lot of the same social uses that modern gatherings serve: People exchange information, make connections, or try to improve their position.

Have mass shootings become the American way of life? There's a mass shooting every few days - not seems - is.
University of Virginia college football players were shot to death on November 13 in a parking garage in Charlottesville after a team trip to see a play in Washington, D.C. A former member of the team is in custody, charged with murder.
Daniel Aston, Kelly Loving, Raymond Green Vance, Derrick Rump, Ashley Green Paugh were all shot to death at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, just six days later. A suspect is in custody, facing five counts of murder and five for hate crimes.
And just three days after the Colorado shootings, Brian Pendleton, Kellie Pyle, Randall Blevins, Tyneka Johnson, Lorenzo Gamble, a 16-year-old who has not been named, were shot to death in a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va. The alleged shooter turned a gun on himself and also died. Ten days, three mass shootings - and who would be astonished if, as soon as I say these words, somewhere another mass shooting may strike?
The Gun Violence Archive reports more than 600 mass shootings in which four or more people are shot have occurred so far this year. That is more than 12 mass shootings a week. They are crimes and outrageous, but we can no longer call them surprises.
2020, the United States had a homicide rate of 7 per 100,000 people killed. Canada's rate, by contrast, was 2 per 100,000. Australia's was 1. We report these statistics many times a year, but I wonder if they haven't become a kind of white noise we cease to hear.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, but is known by the pen name Mark Twain. When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, a port town on the Mississippi River, that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In 1847 he became a printer's apprentice and then began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.
At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Bixby, inspired Twain to begin a career as a steamboat pilot. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports along the river banks. Twain maintained that his pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating "safe water" for the boat to float over, was measured on the sounding line. The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain", twain" being an archaic term for "two."
In February 1870 he got married and the couple lived in Buffalo, New York. A year later they moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 Twain arranged the building of a dramatic house for them.
Mark TwainÕs first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in 1865. Twain's major publications were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain made a great amount of money through his writing, but he spent much of it in bad investments, but he also lost money through his publishing house, He was able to pay back his debts with money he made on lecturing tours in America and England.
Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut.