Monday, May 23

2005-05-23 07:04

Today is Monday, May 23, the 143rd day of 2005. There are 222 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1430 - Joan of Arc is captured near Compiegne, France, by Burgundians, who sell her to the English.

1785 - Bejamin Franklin creates his own pair of bifocals.

1853 - Constitution of Argentine Republic goes into effect.

1873 - Canada's North West Mounted Police force is established.

1915 - Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary, entering World War 1.

1920 - The Communist Party of Indonesia is formed, the first such leftist organisation to be set up in Asia outside the former Russian empire.

1926 - France declares Lebanon a republic.

1934 - US robber couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are shot to death in a police ambush as they drive a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.

1939 - Britain's Parliament approves plan for independent Palestine by 1949, which later is denounced by Jews as well as Arabs, who oppose a Jewish state in Palestine.

1945 - Nazi official Heinrich Himmler commits suicide while imprisoned in Luneburg, Germany.

1949 - German Federal Republic comes into being with capital at Bonn.

1960 - Israel announces it had captured former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.

1969 - Death toll in Malaysia rioting exceeds 500, with 90 percent of casualties ethnic Chinese.

1971 - An earthquake destroys town of Bingol in eastern Turkey, killing 1 000 people.

1977 - South Moluccan exiles in Netherlands take 161 hostages in elementary school in an effort to get Dutch help in their fight for independence from Indonesia.

1983 - South African fighter planes rocket and strafe alleged guerrilla bases in Mozambique to retaliate for car-bomb attack near air force headquarters in Pretoria three days earlier.

1988 - Hungary's Communist Party outlines sweeping political and economic changes designed to salvage nation's faltering economy.

1992 - United States and four former Soviet republics sign agreement to implement START missile-reduction treaty.

1993 - More than 1.5 million Cambodians ignore Khmer Rouge threats and vote in the country's first free elections in more than two decades.

1994 - A Scud missile slams into a densely populated neighbourhood of San'a, Yemen, as northern troops push into southern oil fields to try to take control of the country's most valuable resource.

1995 - Israel suspends plans to confiscate Arab land in east Jerusalem, acknowledging that it no longer can act at will to strengthen the Jewish hold on the city.

1996 - A North Korean pilot flies his MiG-19 jet across the world's most heavily guarded border and defects to South Korea.

1997 - Moderate Mohammad Khatami wins Iranian presidential elections by a landslide.

1998 - Troops clear out 2 000 students occupying the Indonesian Parliament, and President BJ Habibie, two days into the job as Suharto's successor, swears in a new Cabinet.

1999 - Hundreds of thousands of people gather in Jakarta's streets in a huge show of support for presidential election front-runner Megawati Sukarnoputri.

2000 - Israel pulls last of its soldiers out of south Lebanon.

2001 - Yugoslavia, bowing to US pressure to cooperate with the UN war crimes court or face cuts in economic aid, unveils a new law that allows authorities to extradite former President Slobodan Milosevic for trial.

2002 - A heat wave strikes India and kills 1 030 people, mainly in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Temperatures reached a record 51 degrees Celsius.

2003 - The United States issues a decree formally disbanding Iraq's military forces and their allied paramilitary groups, as well as the information ministry of deposed President Saddam Hussein's regime.

2004 - A bomb planted by suspected rebels explodes in a crowded discotheque in northwest Colombia, killing six people and wounding 82 -the bloodiest in a series of attacks marking the 40th anniversary of Colombia's main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. An earlier explosion at a pool hall in Cartagena killed one person and wounded three.

Today's Birthdays:

Carl von Linne (Linnaeus), Swedish botanist (1707-1778); Franz Anton Mesmer, Austrian physician (1753-1815), Joan Collins, English-born actress (1932--); Rosemary Clooney, US singer (1928-2002); Drew Carey, US comedian (1958--); Jewel, US singer (1974--).

Thought For Today:

Genius does what it must, talent does what it can - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, English author (1803-1873).

- SAPA