On this day in ...... 1968 (40 years ago today), author Edna Ferber died from cancer in New York. She'd been born in 1885 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Jacob Ferber, a storekeeper who'd been born in Hungary, and Julia Neumann Ferber, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "Limited by family finances from pursuing her real dream -- studying at Northwestern University's School of Elocution for a career on stage --" Edna (right) became a newspaper reporter and, eventually, a writer of novels, short stories, and plays. Her autobiography includes accounts of the anti-Semitism she and her Jewish family endured. Among her many works is a 1926 novel about interracial romance between theatrical performers: Showboat. Pathbreaking for its time, it was made into a Broadway musical in 1937.
... 1993 (15 years ago today), "[i]n a late-night emergency session" at its headquarters in New York, the U.N. Security Council voted to adopt Resolution 819, which designated the town of Srebrenica "safe area" for tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilian townspeople besieged by Bosnian Serb troops. The BBC quoted Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić as stating:
We are not going to enter Srebrenica, we just want to pacify Srebrenica.
Two years later, troops led by Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladić seized the town:
An estimated 7,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered and buried in mass graves in the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
Both Karadžić and Mladić remain at large even though the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted them nearly 13 years ago.
