This Day in History
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1923: Insulin, discovered by Canadian Dr Frederick Banting, is made available for general use by diabetics.
OTHER EVENTS
1874: The first ‘Impressionist’ exhibition opens in Paris and features Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot.
1877: Boston-somerville installs the world’s first telephone in Massachusetts.
1912: Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel. Passenger luxury liner SS Titanic sinks and more than 1,500 lives are lost.
1937: Arab terrorists at Haifa assassinate Khalim Pasha Effendi, the assistant chief of police.
1955: In Des Plaines, Illinois, American Ray Kroc opens the first Mcdonald’s franchise — in agreement with brothers Richard James Mcdonald and Maurice James Mcdonald, the American entrepreneurs who founded the fast food company Mcdonald’s — launching an enterprise that would eventually become the world’s largest fast-food chain.
1959: Cuban leader Fidel Castro arrives in Washington, DC, to begin a goodwill tour of the US.
1974: A military coup in the West African country of Niger overthrows the Government of President Hamani Diori.
1989: Tragedy occurrs at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, when a crush of football (soccer) fans results in 96 deaths and hundreds of injuries; police mistakes are later blamed for the incident.
1994: More than 100 nations adopt a 26,000-page agreement reforming international trade.
1997: A fire sweeps across a pilgrims’ encampment outside Mecca as two million Muslims gather for one of Islam’s most sacred rituals; at least 343 people are killed.
1998: Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary movement in Cambodia, dies in captivity of a heart attack at 73, thus evading prosecution for the deaths of two million Cambodians civilians in the 1970s.
2000: Defying tear gas and police beatings, hundreds of supporters of jailed Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim mark the anniversary of his conviction with a protest that results in 46 arrests.
2003: US President George W Bush declares an end to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime, less than a week after US forces seized Baghdad and US and Kurdish forces entered Kirkuk and Mosul in northern Iraq.
2004: Two factions of the rebel National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) in north-eastern India agree to halt their two-decade separatist campaign and hold peace talks with New Delhi.
2005: Flames and smoke send people jumping from windows of a budget hotel in Paris housing many African immigrants; the overnight fire that leaves 20 people dead, half of them children.
2006: China announces tariff cuts on imports of fruit and fish from Taiwan, offering the self-ruled island new trade concessions in an effort to boost sentiment for uniting with the communist mainland.
2009: About 100 young Afghan women protesting a law that lets husbands demand sex from their wives are pelted with stones by angry men who call them “dogs”, a confrontation that highlights the explosive nature of the women’s rights debate in Afghanistan.
2010: An enormous ash cloud from a remote Icelandic volcano causes the biggest flight disruption since September 11, 2001 as it drifts over northern Europe and strands travellers on six continents.
2011: Online poker in the US faces indictment as the United States v. Scheinberg case shuts down sites, and companies are accused of fraud and money laundering.
2012: Taliban insurgents strike the heart of the Afghan capital and three eastern cities, firing automatic weapons and grenades at embassies, government buildings, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bases as they launch the spring fighting season with the boldest and most complex assault in years.
2013: Nicolás Maduro is narrowly elected president of Venezuela.
2017: A suicide car bomb targets buses carrying Syrian evacuees at Rashidin; 126 are killed, including 70 children.
2019: Aretha Franklin posthumously receives the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation honour, the first individual woman to win it since 1930. Measles cases jump 300 per cent in the first three months of 2019, according to World Health Organization; the largest rise is in Africa (700 per cent) with 800 deaths in Madagascar.
2020: The USA marks its deadliest day during the COVID-19 pandemic with 2,752 deaths reported.
2021: A court in Abidjan,
Côte d’ivoire, sentences former warlord Amadé Ouérémi to a life sentence for massacres committed by his militia following the 2010 election.
2023: Germany ends its use of nuclear power by closing its last three nuclear power plants to focus on renewable energy. Indian Atiq Ahmed, a former lawmaker and convicted criminal, is assassinated live on TV along with his brother Ashraf in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, while under police guard.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Nanak, guru and founder of Sikhism (1469-1539); Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician (17071783); A Philip Randolph, US civil rights leader and trade unionist (1889-1979); Kim Il-sung, North Korean dictator (1912-1994); Sir John Golding, orthopaedic surgeon and founder of Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre (formerly Mona Rehabilitation Centre (1921-1996); Owen “Blakka” Ellis, Jamaican comedian-actor (1960- )