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Showing posts from January, 2021

HIS: This Day in History: 2020 – The United Kingdom's membership within the European Union ceases in accordance with Article 50, after 47 years of being a member state.

  Withdrawal from the European Union is the legal and political process whereby an EU member state ceases to be a member of the Union. Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) states that "Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements". As of December 2020, the United Kingdom is the only former member state to have withdrawn from the European Union. The process to do so began when the UK Government triggered Article 50 to begin the UK's withdrawal from the EU on 29 March 2017 following a June 2016 referendum, and the withdrawal was scheduled in law to occur on 29 March 2019. Subsequently, the UK sought, and was granted, a number of Article 50 extensions until 31 January 2020. On 23 January 2020, the withdrawal agreement was ratified by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and on 29 January 2020 by the European Parliament. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020 at 23:00 GMT ending 47 years of membersh

HIS: This Day in History: 1928 – Leon Trotsky is exiled to Alma-Ata.

  Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November [26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Trotskyism. Born to a wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish family in Yanovka (now Bereslavka), Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev in 1896. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and subsequently exiled to Siberia. He escaped from Siberia in 1902 and moved to London, where he befriended Vladimir Lenin. During the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ideological split, he sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks. Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, after which he was again arrested and exiled to Siberia. He once again escaped and spent the following years working in Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain and the United States. After the 1917 February Revolution brought

HIS: This Day in History: 1933 – Adolf Hitler's rise to power: Hitler takes office as the Chancellor of Germany.

  Adolf Hitler's rise to power began in Germany in September 1919 when Hitler joined the political party then known as the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – DAP (German Workers' Party). The name was changed in 1920 to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party). It was anti-Marxist and opposed to the democratic post-war government of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, advocating extreme nationalism and Pan-Germanism as well as virulent anti-Semitism. Hitler attained power in March 1933, after the Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act of 1933 in that month, giving expanded authority. President Paul von Hindenburg had already appointed Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 after a series of parliamentary elections and associated backroom intrigues. The Enabling Act – when used ruthlessly and with authority – virtually assured that Hitler could thereafter constitutionally exercise