This Day in History – June 30
Today is Monday, June 30, the 181st day of 2014. There are 184 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1997: Hong Kong is transferred to China in an eight-hour farewell ceremony after 156 years of British rule.
OTHER EVENTS
1930: Britain recognises independence of Iraq.
1934: Night of Long Knives: hundreds of leading Nazis are murdered on Hitler’s orders.
1950: US President Harry Truman announces he has ordered US troops stationed in Japan to help Republic of Korea repel North Korean invaders.
1956: Leeward Islands Federation is dissolved to enable islands to enter Caribbean Federation.
1960: The Belgian Congo becomes the independent Republic of the Congo. Civil war soon erupts.
1971: Three Soviet cosmonauts, in space for more than three weeks, are found dead when their Soyuz 11 spacecraft lands. A leak had caused their craft to decompress.
1976: US spacecraft’s photographs of Mars show that planet once sustained abundant and rapidly flowing water.
1991: Two top leaders of Algeria’s rebellious fundamentalists are arrested, and clashes between their followers and Algerian security forces leave at least one dead.
1992: Fidel Ramos is sworn in as Philippine president.
1993: A federal judge blocks the North American Free Trade agreement with Mexico and Canada until the Clinton administration details its likely effects on the environment.
1996: Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs and a suspected war criminal, bows to international pressure and steps aside, handing over to an equally nationalist deputy.
2001: Congo ends a more than two-decade break in top-level relations with its old colonial ruler by welcoming Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt into the country.
2002: The US vetoes a UN Security Council resolution extending the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina by six months, citing US concerns over the establishment of an International Criminal Court.
2008: US President George W Bush signs legislation to pay for the war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of his presidency and beyond, hailing the $162 billion plan as a rare product of bipartisan cooperation.
2011: A high-ranking Hezbollah member linked to the 2983 truck bombings of the US and French embassies in Kuwait is among four people indicted by an international tribunal in the assassination at former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
2012: Islamist Mohammed Morsi becomes Egypt’s first freely elected president, launching his four-year term with a potentially dangerous quest to wrest back from the military the full authority of his office
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
George Duhamel, French author (1884-1966); Walter Ulbricht, East German Communist leader (1893-1973); Czeslaw Milosz, Czech poet and Nobel laureate (1911-2004); Lena Horne, US singer (1917-2010); David Alan Grier, actor/comedian (1955–); Vincent D’Onofrio, US actor (1959–).
