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Tuesday, August 15
15/08/2006 10:36 - (SA)
Today is Tuesday, August 15, the 227th day of 2006. There are
138 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1057 - Macbeth is killed in battle by Malcolm, son of late king
Duncan, near Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1047, Macbeth killed Duncan to
grab the Scottish throne. The fight for the crown continued for
generations.
1498 - Grenada is sighted by Christopher Columbus. He sails past
the island without landing and gives it the name Concepcion.
1658 - Sweden's King Charles X begins second war with Denmark
and lays siege to Copenhagen.
1834 - South Australia Act is passed by Britain's parliament,
allowing for establishment of colony there.
1865 - Sir Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, discovers the
antiseptic process and reduces postoperative patient mortality to
less than 15 percent in one year.
1914 - The Panama Canal is officially opened.
1920 - Polish Marshal Jozef Pilsudski crushes Soviet troops in
the Battle of Warsaw, blocking their march on western Europe.
1945 - Korea is liberated from 35 years of colonial rule with
Japan's defeat in World War II. The peninsula is divided into the
communist North and capitalist South.
1947 - After 200 years, India becomes independent from British
rule with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister. Pakistan, a new
country is carved out of India.
1950 - A magnitude 8.4 earthquake kills 200 people and destroys
76 800 square kilometres of land in Assam,
northeast India.
1955 - Indian independence day is marked with an invasion of
Portuguese Goa where 5 000 Indians, advocates of passive
resistance, walk into the fire of Portuguese police. Thirteen
Indians are killed and 100 injured.
1962 - The Netherlands and Indonesia settle West New Guinea
dispute.
1965 - Four days of rioting begin in Los Angeles, what becomes
known as the Watts Riots, that leave more than 30 dead and hundreds
injured.
1971 - Bahrain gains independence from Britain.
1974 - Wife of South Korea's President Park Chung-Hee is killed
in Seoul by assassin's bullet evidently intended for her husband.
1975 - Bangladesh's founding father, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, is
assassinated with most of his family in a successful military coup.
1982 - South Korea frees 1 251 convicted criminals and 35 jailed
political dissidents in a general amnesty, celebrating its
liberation from Japanese colonial rule in August 1945.
1990 - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein offers to withdraw from
Iranian territory and release prisoners of war in bid to win favour
with Tehran against United States.
1991 - UN Security Council authorizes Iraq to export US$1.6bn
of oil to finance desperately needed food, medicine and
emergency supplies.
1994 - Carlos the Jackal, freelance terrorist, is arrested in
Sudan and flown to Paris for trial. He is eventually sentenced to
life in prison by a Paris court for the 1975 murders of two French
secret agents and an alleged informer.
1996 - In a sign that Bosnia's wartime isolation is over,
Sarajevo's battered airport welcomes its first commercial flights
in more than four years.
1998 - A car bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland, kills 29 people
and injures 370.
1999 - An armed group kills 29 people in southwestern Algeria in
the worst violence since President Abdelaziz Bouteflika took office
in April.
2000 - A group of 100 separated family members from North Korea
arrive in South Korea for temporary reunions with relatives they
haven't seen for half a century; a group of 100 South Koreans also
visits the North.
2001 - The death toll in the ambush of a refugee train by
Angolan rebels rises to 252 after rescue workers identify 100 more
bodies.
2002 - Police in Zimbabwe begin arresting white farmers who
defied a government order to leave their farms.
2003 - The US closes the Washington, DC offices of two
Iranian opposition groups after determining that they were aliases
of the Mujaheddin al-Khalq, an organisation designated as a
terrorist group by the US State Department.
2005 - On the first day of Israel's Gaza pullout, thousands of
Israeli troops hand out eviction notices to sobbing settlers and
help some pack, but also scuffle with crowds of protesters who are
resistant to leave.
Today's Birthdays:
Napoleon Bonaparte, French emperor (1769-1821); Sir Walter
Scott, Scottish novelist-poet (1771-1832); Ethel Barrymore, US actress (1879-1959); T(homas) E(dward) Lawrence (of Arabia),
British soldier and author (1888-1935); Julia Child, English TV
chef (1912-2004); Oscar Peterson, Canadian jazz pianist (1925--);
Linda Ellerbee, US author/journalist (1944--); England's Princess
Anne (1950--).
Thought For Today:
We must not read either law or history backward - Helen M Cam,
English historian and educator (1885-1968).
- Sapa-AP
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