TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2018

On this day in history: 1302 - The weaver Peter de Coningk led a massacre of the Flemish oligarchs.

1642 - Montreal, Canada, was founded.

1643 - Queen Anne, the widow of Louis XIII, was granted sole and absolute power as regent by the Paris parliament, overriding the late king’s will.

1792 - Russian troops invaded Poland.

1802 - Great Britain declared war on Napoleon’s France. 1804 - Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed emperor by the French Senate.

1828 - Battle of Las Piedras ended the conflict between Uruguay and Brazil.

1841 - Eyre’s sole surviving companion, Wylie the Aborigine, gorges himself on a penguin and most of a kangaroo.

1854 - Australia’s first horse-drawn railway line commences operations in South Australia.

1897 - A public reading of Bram Stoker’s new novel,

Dracula, or, The Un-dead, was performed in London.

1931 - Japanese pilot Seiji Yoshihara crashed his plane in the Pacific Ocean while trying to be the first to cross the ocean non-stop. He was picked up seven hours later by a passing ship.

1944 - Monte Cassino, Europe’s oldest Monastic house, was finally captured by the Allies in Italy.

1951 - The United Nations moved its headquarters to New York City.

1974 - India became the sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.

1994 - Israel’s three decades of occupation in the Gaza Strip ended as Israeli troops completed their withdrawal and Palestinian authorities took over.

2005 - A second photo from the Hubble Space Telescope confirms that Pluto has two additional moons, Nix and Hydra.

2014 - Russian President Putin signed a bill to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federat ion.

2015 - At least 78 people die in a landslide caused by heavy rains in the Colombian town of Salgar.