On this day - June 23
2009-06-23 08:43
Today is Tuesday, June 23, the 174th day of 2009. There are 191 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
963 - Luxembourg becomes an independent principality when Siegfried, Count of Ardennes, exchanges his lands for a small but strategically placed Roman castle along the Alzette River.
1532 - England's King Henry VIII and France's King Francis I sign secret alliance against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
1757 - British under Robert Clive defeat forces of the nawab of Bengal at Plassey, leaving British masters in Bengal.
1760 - Austrians defeat Prussians guarding passes into Silesia at Landshut, Bavaria.
1797 - Peasant "Army of the Holy Faith" enters Naples, ending the republic installed by the French and paving the way for the return of the Bourbon king.
1848 - "June Days" civil war begins when workers fired by the government put up barricades in Paris. They are brutally put down by the army three days later.
1934 - Saudi Arabia and defeated Yemen sign peace treaty after seven-week border war.
1952 - US Air Force bombs hydroelectric plants in North Korea.
1956 - Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser is elected president of Egypt.
1970 - Japanese students clash with police in Tokyo in huge demonstration against continuing US-Japan security pact.
1980 - Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and her "heir apparent", dies when his aerobatics plane crashes.
1985 - All 329 people aboard an Air-India Boeing 747 die as it crashes into the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Toronto to Bombay. Sikh separatists are accused of planting a bomb.
1992 - With a peace platform, the Labour Party defeats ruling right-wing Likud Party in Israeli elections.
1993 - Nigeria's military dictator, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, voids results of presidential elections and halts a return to democracy.
1994 - Some 2 500 French troops head into Rwanda to protect civilians, the first outside forces sent there since UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali appealed for international involvement to stop the genocide.
1995 - Chechen and Russian negotiators agree to extend a cease-fire in the secessionist southern republic, despite violations on both sides.
1997 - In the Central African Republic, soldiers fire on foreign peacekeepers in the third major rebellion since May 1996. The army objects to the 1993 election of President Ange-Felix Patasse and eventually deposes him in 2003.
1998 - The first large-scale test of an Aids vaccine begins in Philadelphia, United States, when the first of 5 000 volunteers get injections.
1999 - The European Union says it will fund efforts to undermine Slobodan Milosevic's rule in Yugoslavia.
2001- Peru's fugitive ex-spy Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos, wanted on human rights and corruption charges, is captured in Caracas, Venezuela.
2002 - China allows 26 North Korean migrants who had sought asylum in foreign diplomatic compounds in Beijing to leave the country for South Korea.
2003 - The US Supreme Court upholds the use of race as one of many factors in University of Michigan's admissions, but rejects a "points-based method" of racial preferences that fails to examine each student application on an individual level.
2004 - Facing global opposition fuelled by the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, the United States drops a contentious UN resolution that sought to renew an exemption shielding American troops from international prosecution for war crimes.
2005 - Rights groups show a smuggled video of hundreds of thousands of poor Zimbabweans living in the open in the winter cold after the government tore down their homes in what it described as an urban renewal project.
2006 - The World Health Organisation details the first evidence that a person likely caught the bird flu virus from a human, then passed a slightly mutated version to another person. But experts say the genetic change does not increase the threat of a pandemic.
2007 - A Yemeni guard opens fire on a group of foreign oil workers shortly after they land at Occidental Petroleum Corp's airstrip, killing one and wounding five.
2008 - A Pakistani court rules that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is not eligible to run in upcoming parliamentary elections because he had been convicted of a crime.
Today's Birthdays:
Josephine, French empress and wife of Napoleon Bonaparte (1763-1814); Edward VIII, King of England (1894-1972); Anna Akhmatova (pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko), Russian poet (1889-1966); James Edward Meade, English economist (1907-1995); Alan Turing, British mathematician and computer pioneer
(1912-1954); Bob Fosse, US dancer/choreographer (1927-1987); Randy Jackson, talent judge on "American Idol" (1956--); Frances McDormand, US actress (1957--).
Thought For Today:
Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith - Franz Kafka, author and poet (1883-1924).
Sapa-AP