Today in history
Today is Monday, August 13, the 225th day of 2018. There are 140 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1521 — Spaniard Hernando Cortes captures Tenochtitlan, completing the defeat of the Aztec Empire.
1624 — King Louis XIII of France names Cardinal de
Richelieu as first minister.
1704 — Forces of the English Duke of Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy defeat the French at Blenheim, Bavaria, driving enemy soldiers into the Danube and saving Vienna from the French. Around 18,000 men were killed or wounded (over 3000 drowned).
1784 — Britain’s India Act places the East India Company under a governmentappointed board of control.
1787 — The Northwest Ordinance is enacted by the United States Congress, outlining how the territory north of the Ohio River would be governed and how the land would evolve into states.
1788 — Prussia joins the AngloDutch alliance to form the Triple Alliance, hoping for territorial gains in the Baltic region.
1792 — French revolutionaries imprison the French
royal family.
1898 — US forces in the Philippines capture Manila
from the Spaniards in the SpanishAmerican War.
1921 — Rugby’s greatest rivalry begins when the
All Blacks beat the Springboks 135 at
Carisbrook in the first of a threetest series, before a crowd of 25,000. A feature of the All Blacks’ 232 scrum was frontrower Ned Hughes, who aged 40 years and 123 days remains the oldest All Black player.
1937 — Japanese forces attack the Chinese city of
Shanghai.
1945 — The World Zionist Congress demands the
admission of 1 million Jews to Palestine.
1951 — New Zealand’s Meals on Wheels service
begins in Wellington.
1961 — East Germany seals off the border between East and West Berlin, closing the
Brandenburg Gate to stop people fleeing the country.
1983 — The Indian Government starts to erect a barbedwire fence along the entire 4000km border with Bangladesh to prevent the entry of illegal aliens. Resentment of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh flared into weeks of violence in which 3000 were killed.
1990 — Five New Zealand servicemen are rescued from a snow trench on Mt Ruapehu after two of the group trekked for help in a blizzard. Six members of the party died while waiting to be rescued. Three days later, a solo Japanese climber walked down the mountain unharmed, after spending five days waiting out the storm in a snow cave.
1993 — A sixstorey hotel in Thailand crashes down, killing at least 24 people, injuring about 350, and trapping dozens in the debris.
2003 — Libya and families of victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland sign an agreement for $2.7 billion in reparations. The agreement also called for Libya to acknowledge responsibility for the bombing.
2004 — The XXVIII Olympiad opens in the Greek capital Athens with a triumphal pageant to welcome home the Olympic Games.
2005 — David Lange, who led the Labour Party to a landslide victory in 1984, unseating the contentious Robert Muldoon, and helped establish New Zealand as a nuclearfree country, dies aged 63.
2012 — Mt Tongariro erupts for the first time in 100 years, sending a plume 7000m skyward and carpeting surrounding areas in ash. It is considered a steambased eruption, and scientists warn it could be a forerunner to a much larger event.