This Day in HISTORY
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1998: Bowing to the wish of the pope, the Catholic church in Germany stops issuing certificates allowing abortion.
OTHER EVENTS
1340: Edward III of England declares himself king of France, a claim that leads to the Hundred Years’ War. The kings of England call themselves kings of France until 1801.
1880: Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
1888: The National Geographic Society is incorporated in the United States.
1977: The Vatican reaffirms the Roman Catholic church’s ban on female priests.
1981: Indonesia’s Tampo Mas II passenger ship catches fire and sinks in the Java Sea, killing 580 people. 1999: Eamon Collins, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) intelligence officer and author of an exposé of life inside the IRA, is found dead near the Northern Ireland town of Newry.
2000: Human rights officials announce they have unearthed the remains of 50 people at a clandestine cemetery in Zacualpa, a village 40 miles (64 kilometres) north-west of Guatemala City; the victims, including two children, were apparent casualties of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.
2002: Munitions at an army base
in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, explode and send fireballs and shrapnel into the air, forcing hundreds of area residents to flee; as many as 600 people drown in a canal that blocked their way to safety.
2003: UN weapons inspectors report that although the Iraqi Government had given inspectors access to suspected weapons sites, it had not provided sufficient information about its weapons programmes and stockpiles; this report is seen as bolstering the US case for military action to disarm Iraq.
2006: Bolivian President Evo Morales cuts his salary in half and orders that no Cabinet minister collect a higher wage than his own, with the savings being used to hire more public school teachers.
2007: Suspected Muslim separatists ambush police patrols and torch a school in southern Thailand a day after killing a police sergeant and setting fire to a government school.
2008: Guyana deploys security forces in villages and forests surrounding Lusignan where, the day before, rampaging gunmen killed 11 people including five children.
2009: A cruise ship carrying 300 passengers, which lodged in the St Lawrence River’s thick ice near Montreal for more than 30 hours, is freed using an ice-breaking vessel.
2010: An Ethiopian Airlines jet crashes minutes after take-off from Beirut in a fierce storm; international ships search along Lebanon’s coast for bodies of the 90 people on-board and black boxes that may provide the cause of the disaster.
2011: Chilean judicial officials vow to investigate the death of President Salvador Allende for the first time, 37 years after the socialist leader was found shot during a withering attack on the presidential palace.
2013: Flames race through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil, killing more than 230 people in the world’s deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.
2014: Army chief Abdelfattah el-sissi, who led the coup ousting Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, moves close to declaring his candidacy to replace him, securing the backing of the military for a presidential run.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (1756-1791);
Edouard Lalo, French composer
(1823-1892); Lewis Carroll, English mathematician and writer (18321898); Jerome Kern, US composer
(1885-1945); Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (1931-2001);
James Cromwell, US actor (1940- );
Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian ballet dancer (1948- )