This Day in HISTORY
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1994: Former US President George Bush’s office releases his letter of resignation from the National Rifle Association in which Bush expresses outrage over its reference to federal agents as “jackbooted government thugs”.
OTHER EVENTS
1796: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte defeats Austrians at Lodi in Italy campaign.
1857: Indian soldiers in British army, called sepoys, revolt at Meerut near Delhi, starting Indian Mutiny.
1869: A golden spike is driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.
1871: Treaty of Frankfurt ends Franco-prussian War, with France ceding Alsace-lorraine. France regains the area after World War I.
1875: Religious orders are abolished in Russia.
1940: Germany invades Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigns and Winston Churchill forms Government.
1941: German Nazi leader Rudolf Hess parachutes into Scotland on a mission to negotiate peace between Britain and Germany. He is treated as a prisoner of war.
1957: Soviets appeal to United States and Britain to halt nuclear tests. 1967: US jet planes bomb power plants in North Vietnam’s port of Haiphong for first time in Vietnam War.
1968: Preliminary Vietnam peace talks begin in Paris.
1972: South Vietnam’s President Nguyen van Thieu declares state of martial law.
1976: Israel announces plans to establish numerous additional settlements in occupied Arab territory.
1981: Socialist Francois Mitterrand wins presidential election, bringing first leftist Government in three decades to power in France.
1988: United States vetoes UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon.
1990: India’s worst cyclone in 10 years kills 85 people and floods 90 villages.
1991: UN peacekeepers formally declare the Iraq-kuwait border a demilitarised zone.
1992: Peruvian police storm a prison cell block held by mutineering prisoners from the Shining Path guerrilla movement, killing at least 28.
1995: An elevator carrying gold miners plunges to the bottom of a deep mineshaft in South Africa, killing
as many as 100 people.
1996: A storm hits Mount Everest, killing eight climbers in one of the worst disasters since Everest was first conquered in 1953. 1997: An earthquake in northeastern Iran kills at least 2,400 people.
1999: The Yugoslav Government announces a partial withdrawal of police and soldiers from Kosovo in hopes of halting NATO’S bombing campaign.
2001: In an unexpected move, the European Central Bank cuts interest rates by a quarter percentage point, confusing markets by first boosting the euro currency then dropping it below the previous day’s rate.
2002: A stand-off between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen who took refuge in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity ends after 39 days as 123 Palestinians exit the church complex under a deal that sends 13 of them into exile in Europe.
2003: A Yemeni court sentences Abed Abdul Razak Kamel to death for killing three American Baptist missionaries and seriously wounding a fourth in a December 2002 attack on a hospital in Jibla.
2005: Egypt’s Parliament overwhelmingly passes a constitutional amendment allowing multicandidate presidential elections for the first time.
2006: A gunman kills reputed crime boss Ryspek Akmatbayev, who was recently elected to Kyrgyzstan’s Parliament.
2009: An unrelenting hail of artillery fire in Sri Lanka’s war zone kills at least 378 civilians, including more than 100 children.
2010: A suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowd, bombers strike a southern city and gunmen spray fire on security checkpoints in attacks that claim nearly 100 lives — most of them in Shiite areas — in Iraq’s deadliest day this year.
2012: Twin suicide car bombs explode outside a military intelligence building and kill 55 people Thursday in the deadliest attack against a regime target since the Syrian uprising began 14 months ago.
2017: All but ignoring the unfurling drama over Russia and the US election, President Donald Trump seeks to advance prospects for cooperation between the former
Cold War foes in Syria and elsewhere in a rare Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Augustin-jean Fresnel, French physicist (1788-1827); Sir Thomas Lipton, British merchant and yachtsman (1850-1931); Karl Bath, Swiss theologian (1886-1968); Fred Astaire, US dancer-actor (18991987); Bono, Irish singer w/rock group U2 (1960- ); Suzan Lori-parks, US playwright (1963- ); Kenan Thompson, US actor/comedian
(1978- ); Merlene Ottey, Jamaican sprint legend (1960- ); Lowell “Sly” Filmore Dunbar, Jamaican drummer extraordonaire (1952- )