TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2019

On this day in history:

590 - Pope Gregory the Great declares that people should say ‘God bless you’ when someone sneezes.

1793 - The first free settlers arrive in New South Wales.

1804 - Lieutenant-Governor David Collins takes command of the first settlement on the Derwent River, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).

1918 - Lithuania proclaimed its independence.

1923 - Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen. The next day he entered the chamber with several invited guests. He had originally found the tomb on November 4, 1922.

1959 - Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba after the overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista.

1970 - Joe Frazier began his reign as the undefeated heavyweight world champion when he knocked out Jimmy Ellis in five rounds. He lost the title on January 22, 1973, when he lost for the first time in his professional career to George Foreman.

1977 - The Anglican archbishop of Uganda, Janani Luwum, was killed in automobile accident. Two other men were also killed.

1983 - The Ash Wednesday bushfires start in Victoria and South Australia.

1987 - John Demjanjuk went on trial in Jerusalem. He was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible”, a guard at the Treblinka concentration camp. He was convicted, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ruling.

1989 - Investigators in Lockerbie, Scotland, announced that a bomb hidden inside a radio-cassette player was the reason that Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down the previous December. All 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground were killed.

1999 - A bomb exploded at the government headquarters in Uzbekistan. Gunfire followed the incident. The event apparently was an attempt on the life of President Islam Karimov.

1999 - Kurds seized embassies and held hostages across Europe following Turkey’s arrest of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.