On this day in ...... 1848 (160 years ago today), in Argentina, in "a paltry prison town in the northwest of Buenos Aires province," a firing squad shot to death Camila O'Gorman, 20 years old and 8 months pregnant. The 5th of 6 children "in an upper class family of mixed Irish, French, and Spanish descent," as a teenager she began an affair with the family's friend and priest, Ladislao Gutiérrez. When the affair became public O'Gorman shocked all by "claimed that it had been she who had initiated the affair and insisted on their elopement." O'Gorman (left) and her lover were executed as charges of "moral corruption" swirled around the regime in power.
... 1964, having failed to meet an
International Olympic Committee demand that it condemn apartheid, South Africa was banned from taking part in the 18th Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. The country did not renounce apartheid until 1991, and so the ban remained in place until the 1992 Games in Barcelona.
