TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2018

On this day in history:

1535 - French explorer Jacques Cartier set sail for North America.

1536 - Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was beheaded after she was convicted of adultery. 1568 - After being defeated by the Protestants, Mary the Queen of Scots, fled to England where she was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth.

1588 - The Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon, bound for England.

1643 - The French army defeated a Spanish army at Rocroi, France.

1840 - Strzelecki names the Gippsland region of southeast Australia.

1915 - John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the man who heroically rescued 300 wounded soldiers with a donkey at Gallipoli, is killed. 1926 - Thomas Edison spoke on the radio for the first time. 1926 - Benito Mussolini announced that democracy was deceased. Rome became a fascist state.

1926 - In Damascus, Syria, French shells killed 600 people.

1943 - Winston Churchill told the US Congress that his country was pledging their full support in the war against Japan.

1948 - Australia’s Federal Government announces that rail gauges across Australia will be standardised.

1974 - Erno Rubik invented the puzzle what would later become known as the Rubik’s Cube.

1998 - In Russia, strikes broke out over unpaid wages. 1998 - Bandits stole three of Rome’s most important paintings from the National Gallery of Modern Art. 2003 - Hundreds of Albert Einstein’s scientific papers, personal letters and humanist essays were make available on the Internet. Einstein had given the papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in his will.

2015 - The Refugio oil spill deposited 142,800 U.S. gallons (3,400 barrels) of crude oil onto an area in California considered one of the most biologically diverse coastlines of the west coast.

2016 - EgyptAir Flight 804 crashes into the Mediterranean Sea while traveling from Paris to Cairo, killing all on board.