HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY ON THIS DATE:
News24, South Africa
Friday, September 22
Today is Friday, September 22, the 265th day of 2006.
There are 100 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1499 – Turks ravage Vicenza in Italy.
1550 – Holy Roman Empire fleet captures vessel Port of Africa at
Mehedia in Tunis, naval headquarters of Turkish corsair Dragut.
1609 – The king of Spain orders the deportation of the baptised former
Muslims known as Moriscos.
1711 – Rio de Janeiro is captured by the French.
1792 – French Republic is proclaimed and revolutionary calendar goes
into effect.
1862 – United States President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation
Proclamation, declaring all slaves in the Confederate States free as
of January 01 1863.
1914 – A German submarine sinks three British cruisers in one hour
off the Dutch coast; The German cruiser Emden shells Madras in India.
1927 – Slavery is abolished in Sierra Leone in Africa.
1940 – The Vichy French governor-general concludes an agreement
that makes Indochina the largest Japanese military staging ground in
southeast Asia.
1949 – The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.
1955 – Hurricane Janet, the most violent Caribbean hurricane of the
season, causes almost 600 deaths around the islands.
1960 – A US Marine Corps DC-6 plane en route from Japan to the
Philippines crashes in the ocean 290km south of Okinawa. All 29
passengers are killed.
1965 – A cease-fire is declared in the war between India and Pakistan,
but both sides subsequently violate it.
1970 – Arab chiefs of state send envoys to meet with King Hussein and
Yasser Arafat to persuade them to find a way to contain the fighting
between the Jordanian Army and Palestinian guerrillas.
1974 – Official death toll in hurricane that swept Honduras is put
at 5 000.
1975 – Sara Jane Moore fails in an attempt to shoot US President
Gerald Ford outside a San Francisco hotel.
1980 – Iraqi tanks enter Iran, marking the beginning of the Iran-Iraq
War as a full-scale conflict.
1986 – Two hijackers seize Soviet airliner at Ural Mountains Airport
and kill two passengers before security agents recapture plane and
shoot the hijackers.
1988 – The government of Canada apologises for the World War 2
internment of Japanese-Canadians and promises compensation.
1989 – FW De Klerk takes over as president of South Africa.
1990 – Jordan’s King Hussein appeals to the US in a televised message
to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia to avert "death, destruction
and misery".
1992 – Azerbaijani-armed forces mount an offensive against the disputed
enclave Nagorno-Karabakh.
1993 – Abkhazian rebels in Georgia shoot down second passenger plane
in two days, killing 80.
1994 – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation aircraft strikes at Serbian
targets near Sarajevo after UN troops patrolling the city came under
machine-gun and rocket fire.
1995 – America’s Time Warner Inc and Turner Broadcasting System Inc
announce a merger with Time Warner purchasing TBS in a deal valued
at $7.5bn, creating the world’s largest media company.
1996 – Typhoon Violet veers into the North Pacific after killing seven
and setting off landslides that paralysed transportation in Japan.
1997 – US President Bill Clinton, speaking at the United Nations,
announces that he will submit to the senate a treaty banning all
nuclear explosions.
1998 – Troops from South Africa and Botswana cross into Lesotho and
storm the royal palace, touching off a gunbattle with protesters.
1999 – Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes is killed and two others
assaulted in separate attacks in East Timor blamed on anti-independence
militiamen.
2001 – Pope John Paul II visits Kazakhstan and Armenia and cautions
against allowing September 11 terrorist attacks on the US to create
divisions between Muslims and Christians.
2004 – The US military drops an espionage charge against a Muslim
interpreter accused of spying at the camp for terror detainees at the
US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It is the third Guantanamo
spy case of the year to fall apart.
2005 – Bosnia’s top international official orders the Bosnian Serb
finance minister to identify the origins of illegal payments made to
the Serb Democratic Party after the party’s bank accounts were frozen
because of fraud.
Today’s Birthdays: Michael Faraday, British physicist (1791-1862);
Caroline Astor, US aristocrat of New York high society (1830-1908);
Erich von Stroheim, German director and actor (1885-1957); Louis
Botha, South African soldier-statesman (1862-1919); John Houseman,
US stage/radio actor (1902-1988); Fay Weldon, British writer (1931);
Joan Jett, US rock singer (1960).
Thought For Today: The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks
into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the
cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce –
DH Lawrence, English author (1885-1930).