It happened – January 17
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It happened
NTB
17 January 2023 02:00
1647: The Norwegian postal service was established. As in many other countries, the operation of the post office was contracted out to private actors as a royal prerogative. The Dutchman H. Morian therefore became the first to be entrusted with responsibility for the postal service in Norway. In 1719, the Danish-Norwegian state took over the task of administering the post office. The first postmen were farmers who undertook the delivery of mail free of charge in return for being exempted from certain other civic duties. The first fixed postal routes ran between Christiania and the cities of Copenhagen, Bergen and Trondheim. According to Store norske lexikon, the original mail was once a week in southern Norway, but only two or three times a year from Trondheim and northwards.
1961: President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the American people. In the televised speech he gave three days before he resigned, Eisenhower warned against too strong an alliance between the US arms industry and the military. When industry and the armed forces had overlapping interests, Eisener believed, they could together constitute a power factor with unhealthy influence on democracy. He called this type of alliance “the military-industrial complex”. The ex-general’s concern about the arms industry moving in gained new relevance during the Vietnam War a few years later. Parts of Eisenhower’s speech are included in the opening sequence of Oliver Stone’s film «JFK» (1991), about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
1991: A coalition force led by the United States launched the invasion of Iraq under the code name Operation Desert Storm. The operation was a UN-authorized response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and Norway was one of 34 countries that contributed militarily. Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein incited his forces by proclaiming the war the “Mother of all wars”. The name plays on an idiomatic expression that has long traditions in the Middle East, and denotes «the ultimate» or «the greatest». In a war context, the term must have appeared as early as the 6th century. The Gulf War in 1991 ended with Hussein’s forces being driven from Kuwait. The Allied losses during the war were officially 343 soldiers, while the number of Iraqi dead was estimated at between 30,000 and 150,000.
(© NTB)
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