This Day in History - July 8

Today is the 189th day of 2010. There are 176 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight

2003: Ladan and Laleh Bijani, 29-year-old Iranian twins who were joined at the head, die in Singapore after doctors in a 54-hour operation managed to separate their brains but were unable to stop blood loss.

Other Notable Events

1846: Denmark's King Christian VIII declares the Danish state indivisible and heritable by females.

1885: The Wall Street Journal is first published.

1895: Opening of Delagoa Bay Railway gives Transvaal -- now in South Africa -- an outlet to the sea.

1920: Britain annexes East African Protectorate as Kenya Colony.

1940: Norwegian government moves to London 62 days after Nazi Germany invades that country.

1976: Indonesian government says 9,000 people died in earthquake in New Guinea.

1986: Kurt Waldheim is inaugurated as Austria's president despite admitting he lied about serving in the German army during World War II.

1992: Heavy artillery battles rage across Sarajevo as Bosnia's president Alija Izetbegovic leaves the country to seek help at an international summit.

1994: Kim Il Sung, North Korea's longtime ruler, dies.

1995: Phanor Arizabaleta, one of the top leaders of the Cali cocaine cartel, surrenders in Bogota, Colombia. He later gets 28 years in prison.

1996: The first Islamist-led government in Turkey's modern history narrowly wins a vote of confidence.

1997: NATO extends membership invitations to three Eastern European countries -- Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

1998: The Taliban religious army in Afghanistan outlaws televisions and video cassette recorders.

1999: Authorities shut down a reformist paper in Tehran, Iran, sparking a week of violent rioting by students and their hard-line opponents.

2002: A group of about 150 women occupy the ChevronTexaco Corp oil pipeline terminal in Escravos, Nigeria, trapping some 700 workers inside in a seven-day siege. The women demand that ChevronTexaco employ their sons and provide their villages with electricity.

2004: Europe's top human rights court rejects an appeal to grant full human rights to a foetus, saying it is a matter for national governments to decide.

2005: Leader of southern Sudanese rebels, John Garang, makes a triumphant arrival in Khartoum to singing and dancing by thousands of southerners and northerners hopeful for a new era after Africa's longest war.

2006: Poland's governing party accepts the resignation of Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and recommends party chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski -- his identical twin -- to replace him.

2007: Israeli Cabinet approves the release of 250 Palestinian prisoners in a gesture of support for moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

2008: Iraqi officials step up pressure on the US to agree to a specific timeline to withdraw American forces.

2009: President Barack Obama and other leaders of the world's richest industrial countries pledge to seek dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to slow dangerous climate change. They agree for the first time that worldwide temperatures must not rise more than a few degrees.

Today's Birthdays

Jean de La Fontaine, French writer and fabulist (1621-1695); Count Ferdinand Zeppelin, German inventor of dirigible (1838-1917); John D Rockefeller, US financier (1839-1937); Kathe Kollwitz, German artist (1867-1945); Angelica Huston, US actress/director (1951-); Kevin Bacon US actor (1958-); Beck, US rock singer (1970-).

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