TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2017 On this day in history:

1399 - Henry Bolingbroke became the King of England as Henry IV. 1813 - The strange coins “holey dollar” and “dump” are circulated in NSW to combat currency shortages

1868 - Spain’s Queen Isabella was deposed and fled to France. 1938 - The Munich Conference ended with a decision to appease Adolf Hitler. Britain, and France allowed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to be annexed by the Nazis.

1946 - An international military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, found 22 top Nazi leaders guilty of war crimes.

1949 - The Berlin Airlift came to an end. The airlift had taken 2.3 million tons of food into the western sector despite the Soviet blockade.

1963 - The Soviet Union publicly declared itself on the side of India in their dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir.

1966 - Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released at midnight from Spandau prison after completing their 20-year sentences. Speer was the Nazi minister of armaments and von Schirach was the founder of Hitler Youth.

1980 - Israel issued its new currency, the shekel, to replace the pound.

1987 - Mikhail S. Gorbachev retired President Andrei A. Gromyko from the Politburo and fired other old-guard leaders in a shake-up at the Kremlin.

1989 - Thousands of East Germans began emigrating under an accord between the NATO nations and the Soviet Union. 1989 - Non-Communist Cambodian guerrillas claimed that they had captured 3 towns and 10 other positions from the residing government forces. 1990 - The Soviet Union and South Korea opened diplomatic relations.

1991 - Haiti’s first freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by Brigadier General Raoul Cedras. Aristide was later returned to power.

1992 - Moscow banks distributed privatisation vouchers aimed at turning millions of Russians into capitalists.

1997 - France’s Roman Catholic Church apologised for its silence during the persecution and deportation of Jews the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.

1999 - In Tokaimura, Japan, radiation escaped a nuclear facility after workers accidentally set off an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.