TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2008: The USS New York, an amphibious assault ship built with scrap steel from the ruins of the World Trade Center, is christened at Avondale, Louisiana.
OTHER EVENTS
1565: The city of Rio de Janeiro was founded by Portuguese knight Estacio de Sa.
1692: The Salem witch trial begins in the American colony of Massachusetts.
1767: King Charles III expels Roman Catholic Jesuits from Spain.
1790: President George Washington signs a measure authorising the first United
States Census. (Census Day was August 2, 1790.)
1867: Nebraska becomes the 37th state as President Andrew Johnson signed a proclamation.
1893: Inventor Nikola Tesla first publicly demonstrates radio during a meeting of the National Electric Light Association in St Louis by transmitting electromagnetic energy without wires.
1919: Korean Independence is declared in Seoul and two million people rally, leading to brutal Japanese repression.
1954: The United States detonates a dry-fuel hydrogen bomb, code-named Castle Bravo, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
1961: US President John F Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps.
1981: Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands begins a hunger strike at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland; he dies 65 days later.
1985: Julio Sanguinetti is sworn in as constitutional president of Uruguay, ending nine years of military rule.
1988: South African Government introduces Bill to outlaw foreign funding of political activity.
1991: Colombia’s thirdlargest rebel group, the Popular Liberation Army, formally lays down its arms.
1992: Muslims and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina vote for independence from Yugoslavia, enraging Serb nationalists.
1993: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin closes the occupied Gaza Strip “for a number of days” after a Gaza Palestinian stabs to death two Israelis and wounds nine others.
1994: Israel releases more than 500 Palestinian prisoners to coax the Palestinian Liberation Organisation back to peace talks.
1997: About 5,000 neonazis march through Munich to protest an exhibit on the army’s involvement in World War II atrocities.
2003: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described planner and organiser of the September 11 attacks, is captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
2004: Exiled Haitian President Jean-bertrand Aristide, in a phone interview says he was abducted from Haiti by US troops who accompanied him on a flight to the Central African Republic.
2006: Authorities regain control of Afghanistan’s most notorious prison after four days of rioting allegedly sparked by al-qaeda and Taliban convicts. Six inmates are reported killed in the revolt.
2007: Japan’s nationalist
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denies Tokyo’s military forced women into sexual slavery during World War II, backtracking from a past government apology.
2008: Prince Harry returns to Britain after news of his secret deployment as a forward air commander with the military in Afghanistan was leaked to the press.
2011: Yemen’s embattled president accuses the US, his closest ally, of instigating the mounting protests against him, but it fails to slow the momentum for his ouster as hundreds of thousands rally in cities across the country against him.
2012: French President
Nicolas Sarkozy takes refuge from a crowd of several hundred angry protesters in a café while campaigning in the country’s south-west Basque country.
2013: US President Barack Obama, still deadlocked with Republican congressional leaders, formally enacts US$85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts a few hours before the midnight deadline required by law.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Frederic Chopin, Polish romantic pianist and composer (1810-1849); Yitzhak Rabin, former Israeli prime minister (1922-1995); Harry Belafonte, US singer/actor (1927- ); Lupita Nyong’o, actress (1983- ); Justin Bieber, pop singer (1994- ); Winston Rodney, reggae singer and songwriter known as Burning Spear (1945- )