TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2018

On this day in history

1040 – King Duncan I is killed in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth who succeeds him as King of Scotland.

1861 - William Landsborough organises a relief expedition to find missing explorers Burke and Wills.

1875 - The Queenslander newspaper reports on what appears to be the first ever game of Association Football (Soccer) played in Australia - it had been played on August 7. 1893 – France becomes the first country to introduce motor vehicle registration. 1914 – World War I: Start of the Battle of Lorraine, an unsuccessful French offensive designed to recover the lost province of Moselle from Germany.

1916 – World War I: Romania declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1924 - Australia’s last horse-drawn stagecoach service was run by Cobb & Co from Yuleba to Surat on the Darling Downs.

1963 - The Yirrkala Bark Petitions are presented to the Australian Parliament, becoming a catalyst to the recognition of indigenous people. The petitions asserted that Yolngu people owned the land and protested the granting of mining rights to Nabalco.

1975 – The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the longest-running release in film history, opens in London. 1994 – Terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez - “Carlos the Jackal”, is captured.

1997 – Australian Karrie Webb wins LPGA Weetabix Women’s British Open

2000 - An operation gets underway to rescue the men stranded in the sunken Russian submarine, the Kursk, in the Arctic Circle. All 118 died largely the result of slow action by the navy.

2003 - US and Canada hit by a power plant failure that created a power outage affecting 50 million people. Many areas had power restored within 30 hours but others went without for a week.

2007 – Four co-ordinated bombings kill at least 500 Yazidi people and injure 1500 in Iraq.