Today in History

July 14 1789 - Citizens of Paris storm and capture the Bastille prison and release prisoners, marking the start of the French Revolution.

1790 - France’s King Louis XVI accepts the revolutionary constitution.

1900 - International expedition, including US and Japan, takes Tientsin, now Tianjin, in China.

1914 - Dr Robert H. Goddard of Worcester is granted the first patent for a liquid-fuelled rocket design.

1934 - Oil pipeline between Iraq and Lebanon is opened.

1948 - Six RAF De Havilland Vampire planes fly from Britain to Canada, the first jet aircraft to cross the Atlantic.

1958 - Iraq is declared a republic after King Faisal II is killed in a military coup.

1965 - US space probe Mariner 4 flies by Mars, sending back photographs of the Red Planet.

1967 - UN adopts a resolution asking Israel to halt action that was aimed at altering the occupied city of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War.

1976 - Capital punishment is abolished in Canada.

1987 - Two bomb blasts rip through a shopping area in Karachi, killing at least 72 people.

1997 - UN tribunal sentences Bosnian Serb Dusan Tadic to 20 years in prison.

2000 - A powerful solar flare, later named the Bastille Day event, causes a geomagnetic storm on Earth.

2002 - A test launch of a supersonic jetliner envisaged to replace Concorde ends in disaster after exploding in the South Australian desert.

2003 - The USS Ronald Reagan, the first carrier named for a living president, is commissioned.

2006 - Allama Hassan Turabi, chief of the main Shiite political party, is killed in a suicide attack in Karachi.

2008 - Face-scanning system inaugurated at Abu Dhabi International Airport.

2011 - Seven kidnapped Estonian cyclists are freed in Lebanon.

2013 - Seventeen spectators are crushed to death at a boxing match in eastern Indonesia after supporters of the loser rioted.

2014 - Emirates airline signs a $13 billion (Dh47.75 billion) OnPoint contract with General Electric for the maintenance, repair and overhaul of its new GE9 engines.