What’s Happening Today?

World Pneumonia Day. Pneumonia is a preventable and treatable disease that sickens 155 million children under 5 and kills 1.6 million each year. This makes pneumonia the number 1 killer of children under 5, claiming more lives in this age group than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Yet most people are unaware of pneumonia’s overwhelming death toll.[1] Because of this, pneumonia has been overshadowed as a priority on the global health agenda, and rarely receives coverage in the news media.[2] World Pneumonia Day helps to bring this health crisis to the public’s attention and encourages policymakers and grassroots organizers alike to combat the disease.

World Usability Day. Established in 2005 by the Usability Professionals Association, World Usability Day or Make Things Easier Day occurs annually to promote the values of usability, usability engineering, user-centred design, universal usability, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. 

What Happened Today?

1. In 1966, the crew of spaceship Gemini 12 which included Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin were able to view and take pictures of the total solar eclipse over South America from space. These were the first-ever images of a solar eclipse taken from space.

2. In 1984, the first salvage operation in space occurred. Astronauts Dale A. Gardner and Joseph P. Allen aboard space shuttle Discovery performed a series of spacewalks to salvage parts from two satellites, the Palapa B-2 and the Westar 6 which had steered away from their orbits.

3. In 1991, several pro-independence protesters were shot at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor by Indonesian soldiers. about 250 people were killed in this event, which is also known as the Dili massacre or the Santa Cruz massacre

Birthdays

1. 1980 – Ryan Gosling, Canadian actor and musician.

2. 1982 -  Anne Hathaway, multi-award-winning American actress.

Sources: Wikipedia & checkiday.com