TODAY IN HISTORY
1293 Earthquake strikes Kamakura Japan, 30,000 killed.
1774 Britain passes the Quebec Act, extending its boundaries northwards to Hudson’s Bay land and as far south as the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
1874 Levi Strauss markets blue jeans with copper rivets.
1882 Italy joins Austro-german Alliance, which becomes Triple Alliance.
1922 Vietnamese King Khải Định visits France, the first visit by a king of the Nguyễn dynasty (18021945) to a foreign country. Vietnamese patriots took this occasion to carry out many activities exposing to the French public the puppet king’s true face as a traitor to his people and country.
1932 Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland for Ireland to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
1972 A referendum in Cameroon approves the country’s change from a federation into a unitary state.
1974 In the anti-american War, Vietnamese liberation forces destroy the Sài Gòn regime’s biggest fuel dump at Nhà Bè, about 10km from the city centre.
1993 Britain’s lower house of Parliament approves the European Unity Treaty, starting the country on the road to joining the rest of the European Community in ratifying the accord.
1996 Iraq and the United Nations sign an agreement to let the country sell oil to buy food and medicine for its suffering people.
2000 The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty review conference ends at the United Nations with an "unequivocal undertaking" by the five nuclear weapons countries to total nuclear disarmament.
2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-horta is sworn in as East Timor’s second president, and he vows to unite the desperately poor nation more than a year after violence brought down its first government.
2009 US officials say missile test-fired by Iran is the longest range, solid propellant missile it has launched yet, raising concern about the sophistication of Tehran’s missile programme.
2012 Tomislav Nikolić elected president of Serbia.
2013 133 people are killed and 283 are injured in a continued wave of insurgency in Iraq.
2015 Journal Nature publishes findings of the oldest human-made tools from Kenya’s Turkana basin -3.3 million years, 1st found to pre-date the Homo genus.
2017 US President Donald Trump begins his first foreign trip arriving in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
2018 7 President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela wins a second term.
2019 Bangladesh imposes a 65-day ban on coastal fishing to conserve fish stocks.
2020 Cyclone Amphan comes ashore in West Bengal, East India and Bangladesh, with winds of 185km per hour killing at least 84 people.
2021 Israel and Hamas agree to a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza after nearly two weeks of fighting, amid international diplomatic efforts.