This Week In History
March 10, 2018
Designer Hubert de Givenchy, who famously created the iconic “little black dress” Audrey Hepburn wore in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, died at age 91
1994: Students in France protested against paying young people less than the minimum wage
1999: Kosovo refugees fled as Serb forces attacked ethnic albanian villages near the border
2004: Zimbabwe officials foiled a plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea
2014: north Korean leader Kim Jong-un won an election with not one vote cast against him
March 11, 1918
An outbreak of Spanish flu began. It
developed into a global pandemic that killed 50 million people in one of the deadliest disasters in human history
1845: English baker henry Jones patented self-raising flour
1985: new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called for more glasnost, or openness, in Soviet life
1999: The IT company Infosys became the first Indian company to be listed on the naSdaQ stock exchange
2004: Multiple terror attacks on commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and injured over 1,500 during the morning rush hour
March 12, 1969
Beatle Paul McCartney married US photographer Linda Eastman. They were married for 29 years and had three children before her death from cancer in 1998
1894: The first bottles of coca-cola, originally promoted as a nerve and brain tonic, went on sale
1969: Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs
Robinson was voted record of the year at the annual Grammy awards
2009: an Iraqi journalist was jailed for three years for throwing his shoes at then-uS President George W. Bush
2009: uS businessman Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges relating to his uS$65bil Ponzi scheme
March 13, 1992
Pravda, the newspaper founded by Lenin in 1912, was forced to suspend publication due to lack of funds after President Yeltsin shut down Russia’s Communist Party
1988: The Seikan Tunnel, the world’s longest tunnel with an undersea section, opened in Japan
1995: a pledge to wipe out global poverty was made at the un World Summit for Social development
2004: Luciano Pavarotti gave his last performance, in Puccini’s Tosca
2007: President calderon of Mexico restated his opposition to George W. Bush’s plan to build a 700-mile (1,126.5km) fence along the uS border
March 14, 2018
World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking died aged 76. He was the first to set out a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics
1489: catherine cornaro, Queen of cyprus, sold her kingdom to Venice
1794: american inventor Eli Whitney was granted a patent for his revolutionary cotton gin
1986: The European space probe Giotto completed its mission by flying into the tail of halley’s comet
2007: The Sunda clouded leopard, found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, was classified as a separate species
March 15, 1909
Entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge opened London’s first American-style department store, at the then-unfashionable western end of Oxford Street
1964: Elizabeth Taylor and richard Burton were married after meeting during filming of the movie Cleopatra
1994: an asteroid passed within 100,000 miles (160,934km) of earth, a near miss in cosmic terms
2004: astronomers identified Sedna, a
planetary object orbiting the sun more than three billion kilometres beyond Pluto
2011: Protests were held across Syria against the assad regime. Events soon spiralled into a brutal civil war
March 16, 1244
Over 200 Cathars were burned to death for refusing to renounce their faith after the fall of the Chateau de Montsegur, the last Cathar stronghold in France
1867: Joseph Lister found that swabbing with carbolic acid solution greatly reduced the risk of gangrene
1926: Professor robert Goddard successfully launched the first liquid-fuel rocket
1993: France declared ostrich meat fit for human consumption
1999: The first women members of the Marylebone cricket club were allowed to enter the hallowed Long room at Lord’s cricket ground