The Advertiser, Australia
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
The Mercury, Australia
Sunday Times, Australia
Aug 23 2004
On this day – 23aug04
1990 – Soviet Republic of Armenia declares independence
1305 – Scottish rebel leader William Wallace is hanged, drawn and
quartered for treason in London.
1514 – Selim I, Sultan of Turkey, defeats Shah Ismail of Persia at
Tchaldiran.
1628 – Duke of Buckingham, about to embark at Portsmouth, England,
with further expedition to La Rochelle, France, is assassinated by
John Felton.
1775 – England’s King George II proclaims existence of open rebellion
in American colonies.
1813 – French are defeated by German army under Friedrich von Bulow,
preventing march on Berlin.
1839 – Hong Kong is taken by British in war with China.
1870 – Last British troops leave Australia.
1908 – Abdul Aziz of Morocco is defeated at Marrakesh by Mulai Hafid,
the new Sultan.
1913 – Copenhagen’s famous landmark, The Little Mermaid, is unveiled
at the entrance of the harbour.
1914 – Japan declares war on Germany in World War I.
1926 – Film idol Rudolph Valentino dies suddenly in a New York
hospital, aged 31.
1927 – Two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, are executed in Massachusetts despite worldwide protests
they are innocent.
1927 – Nahas Pasha becomes leader of the Wafd in Egypt.
1937 – Japanese military forces land at Shanghai, China.
1942 – Thirteen Japanese planes are shot down in the 24th raid on
Darwin in World War II.
1944 – Allied troops in France capture port of Marseilles in World
War II.
1944 – Romania joins the Allies and breaks its alliance with Hitler’s
Germany. King Michael I declares war on Germany, and orders the
country’s military pro-Nazi leader Marshal Ion Antonescu arrested.
1948 – The World Council of Churches is founded.
1952 – Arab League security pact goes into effect.
1958 – China begins bombardment of island of Quemoy.
1960 – Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II dies in Doylestown,
Pennsylvania.
1962 – US Telstar satellite relays first live television program
between United States and Europe.
1964 – Footbridge collapses over river gorge in Venezuela, and 29
people fall to their deaths in rapids below.
1973 – Four people are taken hostage by a robber in a Stockholm bank.
During the six-day drama the captor and captives develop a friendship
later described and studied as “the Stockholm syndrome”.
1975 – Communists complete takeover of Laos.
1979 – Bolshoi Ballet star Alexander Godunov is granted political
asylum in the United States.
1982 – Lebanon’s parliament elects Christian militia leader Bashir
Gemayel president; he was assassinated three weeks later.
1986 – Leaders of nine southern African nations, meeting in Angola,
express support for international economic sanctions against South
Africa.
1987 – Iraqi warplanes bomb key Iranian petrochemical complex of
Bandar Khomeini.
1990 – Iraqi President Saddam Hussein appears on television with
British hostages held at “a vital Iraqi installation”; Soviet
Republic of Armenia declares independence; East and West Germany
announce they will unite on October 3.
1991 – Following failed coup by hard-liners in the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin act to strip Communist Party of
its power and take control of army and KGB.
1992 – More than 500 survivors return to Singapore from the cruise
ship Royal Pacific, which sank after a collision with a fishing boat;
some 200 young right-wingers attack a hostel for foreign refugees in
Rostock, eastern Germany.
1993 – In Denmark, salvagers hoping for Nazi documents and treasure
hoist a German U-boat out of a muddy seabed where it sank in an
allied attack 48 years ago.
1994 – A wave of refugees fleeing Cuba on inner tubes, planks and
plastic foam blocks, head for the US naval base in Guantanamo.
1996 – The FBI confirms that microscopic traces of an explosive were
found on wreckage from TWA Flight 800, but says it still can’t say
whether the plane was brought down by a bomb or missile.
1997 – Iran’s new moderate president appoints a US-educated lecturer
as vice-president, the first woman to serve in a top government post
since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
1997 – Sir Eric Gairy, prime minister of Grenada from 1974-79, dies.
1998 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin replaces Prime Minister Sergei
Kiriyenko with former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.
1999 – Students opposing the strike at Mexico’s main university try
to enter the campus and scuffle with striking students protesting a
tuition increase. The strike ends in February 2000.
1999 – Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder starts work in Berlin, the first
time Germany had been governed from its traditional capital since
World War II.
2000 – A plane crashes into shallow Persian Gulf waters after
circling and trying to land in Bahrain, killing all 143 people
aboard.
2000 – In a reality TV record an estimated 51 million US viewers tune
in for the finale of CBS’s series Survivor, in which contestant
Richard Hatch wins the $US1 million ($A1.91 million) prize.
2001 – Democratic Rep Gary Condit of California denies any
involvement in the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy; Thierry
Devaux, a Frenchman using a motor-driven parachute, is arrested after
becoming snagged on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.
2002 – Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe unexpectedly dissolves his
cabinet and ousts moderates in a move officials say is related to his
controversial program to seize land from white farmers and
redistribute it to landless blacks.
2003 – John Geoghan, a former Roman Catholic priest whose January
2002 sexual abuse conviction sparked a widespread abuse scandal in
the Catholic church, is beaten and strangled to death in prison.