Tuesday, August 30

2005-08-30 08:07

Today is Tuesday, August 30, the 242nd day of 2005. There are 123 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

30 BC - Cleopatra of Egypt commits suicide by letting an asp bite her.

1526 - Suleiman I, Sultan of Turkey, defeats Hungarian army at battle of Mohacs, at which Louis II of Hungary is killed.

1528 - French Army capitulates at Aversa and subsequently is expelled from Naples and Genoa in Italy.

1645 - Dutch and American Indians make treaty of peace at New Amsterdam, New York.

1862 - Union forces are defeated by the Confederates at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia, during America's Civil War.

1895 - Compulsory Roman Catholic education begins in Belgian state schools.

1898 - Anglo-German secret agreement on future of African territories of Portugal, whereby Britain is to obtain lease of Delagoa Bay and Germany is to receive parts of Mozambique and Angola.

1914 - German forces take Amiens in France during World War 1.

1916 - Turkey declares war on Russia; Paul von Hindenburg is named German chief of general staff.

1928 - Independence of India League is formed in India.

1944 - Russian forces enter Bucharest, Romania, in World War 2.

1945 - Britain re-establishes its governance of Hong Kong, ending three years and seven months of Japanese occupation.

1948 - Dr Hjalmar Schacht is acquitted by a German appeals court in Stuttgart of charges that he was a major Nazi offender.

1951 - US and the Philippines sign mutual defence pact.

1957 - All-African Federal Executive Council is formed in Nigeria.

1960 - East Germany imposes partial blockade of West Berlin.

1963 - A hot line is established between Moscow and Washington, DC.

1972 - US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the five-megaton underground nuclear explosion at Amchitka Island in the Aleutians in November caused 22 minor earthquakes and hundreds of aftershocks over three months.

1979 - Hurricane David devastates Dominica island as it rampages through the Caribbean and United States' eastern seaboard, claiming 1 000 lives.

1981 - Iran's president and prime minister are killed when bomb explodes in government offices in Tehran.

1983 - Guion S Bluford Jr becomes the first black American astronaut to travel in space, blasting off aboard the Challenger.

1987 - Philippines' President Corazon Aquino says mutinous troops wanted to kill her entire family in bloody coup attempt.

1989 - Latvian Communist Party leadership debates splitting off from Communist Party of Soviet Union.

1992 - Five Ethiopian hijackers surrender peacefully at a military airport outside of Rome.

1993 - Robert Malval, ally of exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is installed as prime minister.

1994 - Russia officially ends a half-century of military presence in former East Germany and the Baltics, the last European bastions for former Red Army forces in the Cold War era.

1995 - Sharply raising the stakes in the Bosnian war, Western allies pound the Bosnian Serbs with artillery and air attacks in hopes of forcing them to make peace.

1996 - The lines holding a 21-ton chunk of the Titanic snap, sending it back to the bottom of the sea. The salvage operation is abandoned until the following year. The Titanic sank 680km southeast of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1912.

1998 - Troops allied with the government of Congo capture the strategic port town of Matadi from rebel forces trying to oust President Laurent Kabila.

1999 - Residents of East Timor vote for independence from Indonesia in a U.N.-sponsored ballot.

2000 - A German court convicts three neo-Nazis of beating an African immigrant to death and hands down tough prison sentences in an attempt to signal that a long chain of attacks on foreigners in Germany must stop.

2001 - More than 430 refugees rescued from a sinking ferry, most of them Afghans, languish on a Norwegian cargo ship as Australia refuses them entry.

2001 - Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is to be charged with genocide - the most serious of all war crimes.

2002 - Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi fires his vice president, George Saitoti, in an apparent effort to quash dissent in his ruling Kenya African National Union (Kanu) party.

2003 - Negotiators at a meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva reach an agreement that would allow poor countries with severe epidemics of infectious diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to import generic drugs designed to fight them.

Today's Birthdays:

Jacques Lous David, French painter (1748-1825)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, English author (1797-1851)
Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand scientist and Nobel laureate (1871-1937)
Shirley Booth, US actress (1898-1992)
John Gunther, US journalist/author (1901-1970)
Fred MacMurray, US actor (1908-1991)
Cameron Diaz, US actress (1972--).

Thought for Today:

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising - Cyril Connolly, British journalist-writer (1903-1974).

- SAPA