This Week In History
June 7, 1887
The monotype typesetting machine was patented, in which each letter was an individual piece of metal that could be sorted and re-used 1905: Sweden and norway ended their union with a Treaty of Separation
2000: Microsoft was ordered to split into two separate entities after losing a two-year fight with the US government
2005: Internet search engine Google saw its stock market value top us$80bil, making it the world’s most valuable media company
2015: The number of illegal migrants arriving in Italy from Africa since the start of the year passed 50,000
June 8, 2010
Benigno Aquino III was elected President of the Philippines. He was the son of former president Corazon Aquino and murdered senator Benigno Aquino II
1783: The Laki volcano erupted in Iceland, causing a drop in temperatures that led to global crop failures
1965: US troops were authorised to go into combat in South Vietnam 1990: The Russian parliament voted that its laws should take precedence over the Soviet union
1995: Police fired 800 rounds of tear gas at Vietnamese boat people protesting against their imminent deportation from Hong Kong
June 9, 2019
Mass protests began in Hong Kong over government plans to allow extradition to mainland China. The bill was later withdrawn but the unrest continued
1815: The Congress of Vienna designated the territorial divisions of europe after the napoleonic Wars
1963: Cleopatra, reputedly the most expensive film made to that time, opened, starring Elizabeth Taylor
2010: The dutch government was ousted in the first eurozone general election since the global financial crisis
2010: The world’s oldest leather shoe, thought to be 5,500 years old, was found in a cave in Armenia
June 10, 1190
Frederick I Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, drowned trying to cross the Saleph River in Cilicia (now in Turkey) while on the Third Crusade to free Jerusalem
1990: alberto Fujimori defeated author Mario Vargas Llosa to win
Peru’s presidential election
1990: Czechoslovakia gained its first non-communist government in 40 years, with victory for Vaclav Havel 1995: a team of us scientists published research suggesting that a tendency to smoke could be genetic
2010: BP shares fell to a 13-year low due to US threats of legal action over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill
June 11, 1955
Eighty-three people died at the Le Mans 24-Hour race after a crash catapulted a car into spectators at 150mph, the worst accident in motorsport history
2003: from ethiopia Three 160,000-year-old were revealed as skulls the oldest known fossils of homo sapiens
2005: The G8 industrialised nations agreed to cancel Us$40bil in debt owed by the world’s 18 poorest countries 2009: The World Health Organization declared a global flu pandemic as the H1n1 “Swine flu” virus spread
2010: The FIFA World Cup got underway in South Africa, the first time it had been staged in Africa
June 12, 2005
Massouma al-mubarak was appointed as Kuwait’s first ever woman cabinet minister, with portfolios for planning and administrative development
1935: The Chaco War, a three-year conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay, ended in a truce
2003: The 5,000-year-old Warka Vase, looted from Iraq’s National Museum, was returned anonymously
2015: China’s stock market crashed, with one third of the value of a-shares wiped out over the following month 2018: Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Donald Trump of the US met in Singapore for a historic summit
June 13, 2000
The presidents of North and South Korea, Kim Jong-il (right) and Kim Dae-jung met for the first ever summit between the bitterly divided countries 1990: east Germany began the final demolition of the Berlin Wall, built in 1961 during the Cold War
1995: France announced a series of eight nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific
2015: The Philae space probe briefly reawakened seven months after landing on comet 67P/CG
2019: The US alleged that attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman were carried out by Iran