Tuesday, August 15

2006-08-15 10:36

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

- SAPA