TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS TUESDAY, JULY 31, 2018

On this day in history:

1498 - Christopher Columbus, on his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, arrived at the island of Trinidad. 1900 - Western Australia votes to join the Commonwealth of Australia.

1919 - Germany’s Weimar Constitution was adopted. 1928 - MGM’s Leo the lion roared for the first time. He introduced MGM’s first talking picture, White Shadows on the South Seas.

1932 - Enzo Ferrari retired from racing. In 1950 he launched a series of cars under his name. 1942 - The town of Mossman in far north Queensland is bombed by the Japanese. 1955 - Marilyn Bell of Toronto, Canada, at age 17, became the youngest person to swim the English Channel.

1959 - The Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) was founded. The group is known for being an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organisation. 1980 - China’s population reached 1 billion.

1989 - A pro-Iranian group in Lebanon released a videotape reportedly showing the hanged body of American hostage William R. Higgins.

1991 - US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

1992 – The nation of Georgia joins the United Nations. 1992 – Thai Airways International Flight 311 crashes into a mountain north of Kathmandu, Nepal killing all 113 people on board.

1999 – Discovery Program: Lunar Prospector: NASA intentionally crashes the spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon’s surface.

2006 – Fidel Castro hands over power to his brother, Raúl. 2007 – Operation Banner, the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and the longest-running British Army operation ever, comes to an end.

2012 – Michael Phelps breaks record set in 1964 by Larisa Latynina for the most medals won at the Olympics.

2014 – Gas explosions in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung kill at least 20 people and injure more than 270.