PROGRAMMING NOTE: With apologies I am going to have to forego tonight’s voiceover again. Although I successfully got through last night’s recording the aftereffects made it pretty clear that it was a mistake and I need to at least attempt to do a fair amount of podcasting tomorrow so I need to conserve the voice I have now. Hopefully this will have all cleared up by next week.
TODAY IN HISTORY
April 15, 1395: The Turco-Mongolian warlord Timur defeats the army of the Mongolian “Golden Horde” khanate at the Battle of the Terek River. Timur’s victory ended a threat against his empire by the Golden Horde’s ruler, Tokhtamysh, and allowed him to destroy all of the major cities in the khanate. In doing so he was able to divert commerce along the “Silk Road” from its northern branch, which ran through the Horde’s territory, to a more southernly route that ran through Timur’s territory.
April 15, 1450: In one of the final engagements of the Hundred Years’ War, a French army under Jean de Clermont nearly annihilates an English force commanded by Sir Thomas Kyriell at the Battle of Formigny, in Normandy. The loss of an entire field army left England unable to defend its remaining holdings in Normandy and the region came under French control in the succeeding months. The battle is notable from a military history perspective as perhaps the first recorded use (by the French) of battlefield artillery in Europe. It’s debatable how effective the guns actually were, but their noise did alert French constable Arthur de Richemont to the battle. The arrival of his ~2000 man army on the field was decisive in turning a likely defeat into an overwhelming French victory.
April 15, 1947: Jackie Robinson makes his Major League Baseball debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In doing so, he became the first African-American to play in the MLB, breaking the color barrier that had been entrenched in the league since the 1880s. Two years later he became the first African-American to win his league’s Most Valuable Player award for the 1949 season, and he was inducted in the the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
At time of writing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to convene a meeting of his security cabinet on Wednesday evening to consider a ceasefire in Lebanon. Hezbollah and Lebanese officials have also been talking about a potential ceasefire that would be linked to the US-Iran ceasefire, so if/when one ends the other would also end. The Lebanese officials seem to believe that the Trump administration has been “pressuring” Netanyahu’s government to take this step. The administration hosted Lebanese and Israeli representatives in Washington on Tuesday for talks, ahead of which the Israelis had expressly ruled out a ceasefire. So I have to confess that I’m a bit confused as to what’s happened here.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say, and from Lebanon’s perspective the hows and whys of a ceasefire matter less at this point than just getting to a ceasefire. Even the “you cease, we fire” format of a typical Israeli “ceasefire” would at least reduce the intensity of the current onslaught. The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least 13 more people in Lebanon on Wednesday, adding to the more than 2000 Lebanese it’s killed since March 2. Al Jazeera is reporting a rise in public resentment toward the Lebanese government for opening talks with Israel absent a ceasefire, but it’s unclear if that feeling extends beyond hard hit southern Lebanon. The Guardian reported a few days ago on the extent of the damage the IDF has wrought:
