This Day in History – January 19
Today is the 19th day of 2013. There are 346 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight
2007: The UN’s first all-female peacekeeping contingent — made up of 105 Indian policewomen who have been training since September — is set to deploy to Liberia.
Other Events
1825: Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kinsett patent the tin canning process for food, pioneering the age of convenience for housewives and armies alike.
1918: The Bolsheviks dissolve Russian Constitutional Assembly in Petrograd.
1937: Millionaire Howard Hughes sets a transcontinental air record by flying his monoplane from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in seven hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.
1945: Soviet troops take Krakow, Poland, in World War II.
1956: Sudan joins the Arab League as the ninth member.
1960: The US and Japan sign a treaty of mutual security.
1966: India’s new prime minister, Indira Gandhi, pledges to follow path of nonalignment in world affairs.
1983: The American Psychiatric Association urges a tightening of the rules for the use of the insanity plea in criminal trials.
1992: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition government loses its parliamentary majority.
1993: The Israeli parliament votes to repeal a law prohibiting contact with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
1997: A powerful car bomb explodes outside a cafe in downtown Algiers, killing at least 20 people and wounding 60 others — hours after attackers massacred 36.
1998: Peru and Ecuador agree on a timetable for a peace treaty to formally end their 1995 border war.
2002: The Sudanese government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the main rebel group involved in the country’s 19-year-old civil war, sign a ceasefire agreement for the disputed Nuba Mountains region.
2005: The presidents of Colombia and Brazil meet on their Amazon jungle border to discuss the dispute between Colombia and another neighbour, Venezuela, sparked by the abduction of a Marxist guerrilla on Venezuelan soil. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, emerges as a potential mediator.
2008: The bodies of nearly 50 Africans trying to immigrate wash up on Yemen’s shores after their boat capsizes in the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Aden. The 35 survivors tell authorities that at least 135 people, all Somalis and Ethiopians, were crammed into the boat.
2009: Russia and Ukraine sign a deal that restores natural gas shipments to Ukraine and paves the way for an end to the nearly two-week cutoff of most Russian gas to a freezing Europe.
Today’s Birthdays
James Watt, Scottish engineer-inventor (1736-1819); Auguste Comte, French philosopher (1798-1857); Edgar Allen Poe, U.S. writer (1809-1849); Paul Cezanne, French artist (1839-1906); Robert MacNeil, Canadian-born newsman-writer (1931-); Shelley Fabares, US actress (1944-); Dolly Parton, US singer/actress (1946-).
