BC-Today in History
Associated Press - 21 July 2013 20:06-04:00
Today is Monday July 29, the 210th day of 2013. There are 155 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1499 - Lepanto in Greece surrenders to forces of Turkey's Sultan.
1588 - The English defeat the Spanish Armada in the Battle of Gravelines.
1656 - Poles under John Casimir are defeated at Warsaw by combined Swedish-Brandenburg force.
1696 - Russian forces of Peter the Great take Azov from the Turks.
1858 - United States and Japan sign their first commercial treaty.
1900 - Italy's King Humbert I is assassinated by an anarchist.
1914 - Transcontinental telephone service begins with the first phone conversation between New York and San Francisco.
1921 - All-India Congress decides to boycott Prince of Wales' visit to India.
1922 - Allied powers issue ultimatum forbidding Greeks to occupy Istanbul in Turkey.
1937 - Japanese seize Tianjin in China. Eighteen-year-old Crown Prince Farouk is crowned king of Egypt.
1940 - Germany's aerial blitz against Britain begins during World War II.
1941 - Vichy France and Japan sign agreement for "joint protection" of Indochina. This allows France to continue administering colonies, but Japan sends in troops.
1941 - Group of Maori chiefs sells about 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of land around Waitemata Harbor, present site of Auckland, to the New Zealand government.
1957 - U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an act to create NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
1968 - Pope Paul VI reaffirms the Roman Catholic Church's stance against artificial methods of birth control.
1973 - Voters in Greece endorse decisions by their leaders to abolish Greek monarchy and install George Papadopoulos as president.
1975 - President Gerald Ford is the first U.S. president to visit Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland.
1980 - The biggest military operation of the year in El Salvador kills over 170 peasants and leftist guerrillas near the Honduran border. The guerrillas moved into northern Chalatenango Province and declared the area "free territory of El Salvador." The operation lasts four days.
1986 - South Africa's President P.W. Botha rejects British foreign secretary's plea for unconditional release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela.
1990 - The ruling Communist People's Revolutionary Party retains control of both houses of parliament in the first free elections in Mongolia since communist takeover in 1921.
1991 - South African President F.W. de Klerk demotes two Cabinet ministers in charge of security to defuse scandal over secret payments to group affiliated with Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party.
1993 - Israeli Supreme Court rules Ukrainian-born American John Demjanjuk was not guard at Treblinka Nazi death camp in Poland known as "Ivan The Terrible."
1994 - Indian troops kill 30 people, mostly Muslim militants, in Kashmir.
1995 - Egyptian government arrests at least 200 activists of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mainstream Islamic opposition movement.
1996 - China conducts a nuclear test but promises it will join a moratorium on further tests.
1997 - The waters off Minamata, Japan, are declared free of mercury 65 years after a local factory started dumping waste that caused one of the worst environmental disasters ever.
1998 - A former Cabinet minister of Spain and 11 others are convicted of kidnapping, concluding a trial that exposed the former government's role in death squads that targeted Basque separatists.
1999 - The first express passenger train between Amman, Jordan, and Damascus, Syria, begins service with six new trains.
2000 - A U.S. soldier, Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, pleads guilty to the murder and forcible sodomy of an ethnic Albanian girl in Kosovo. He is later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
2003 - Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday Sankoh, who had been in United Nations custody since 2000 and was awaiting trial on charges of mass murder and other crimes, dies at a hospital in Freetown after a stroke.
2006 - Sri Lanka's air force bombs Tamil Tiger rebel positions for a fourth day, killing seven rebels and wounding 14 in spiraling violence that threatened to drag the country back into full-blown civil war.
2007 - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling party suffers a humiliating defeat in parliamentary elections, one of the Liberal Democratic Party's worst showings in its almost five-decade rule.
2008 — The Bosnian war crimes court convicts seven Bosnian Serbs of genocide in the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, and hands down prison sentences ranging from 38 to 42 years.
2009 - Microsoft finally persuades Yahoo to surrender control of the Internet's second most popular search engine and join it in a daunting battle — taking on the overwhelming dominance of Google in the online advertising market.
2010 - Poll shows Pakistanis have an overwhelmingly negative view of the United States despite billions in aid from Washington and a shared threat from extremists.
2011 - The Libyan rebels' military commander is killed by his comrades while in custody after he was arrested by the opposition's leadership on suspicion of treason, witnesses say, in a sign of disarray that posed a major setback for the moving battling President Moammar Gadhafi.
2012 - Romanian election officials declare that a referendum to impeach the nation's president on grounds that he overstepped his authority had failed because of low voter turnout.
Today's Birthdays:
Alexis de Toqueville, French political scientist (1805-1859); Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator (1883-1945); Booth Tarkington, U.S. novelist (1869-1946), Sigmund Romberg, Hungarian-born composer (1887-1951); Dag Hammarskjold, Swedish U.N. Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1905-1961); Clara Bow, U.S. actress (1905-1965), Mikis Theodorakis, Greek composer (1925--); Peter Jennings, Canadian-born ABC newsman (1938-2005), Ken Burns, U.S. documentary filmmaker (1953--), Martina McBride, U.S. country singer (1966--).
Thought For Today:
The fellow who says he'll meet you halfway usually thinks he's standing on the dividing line — O.A. Battista, Canadian-born author-scientist.
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