This Day in History – Sept 17
Today is the 260th day of 2014. There are 105 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2010: Hurricane Karl smashes into Mexico’s Gulf Coast, creating havoc in the major port city of Veracruz and forcing the country to shut down its only nuclear power plant and its central Gulf Coast oil platforms.
OTHER EVENTS
1595: Pope Clement VII absolves Henry VI, a former Protestant, and recognises him as King of France.
1631: Swedish-Saxon army under Gustav II Adolf of Sweden destroys the Catholic army at Breitenfeld, Germany, marking the rise of Sweden as a major power.
1665: Bubonic plague breaks out in London.
1787: US Constitution is signed by a majority of delegates attending the constitutional convention in Philadelphia.
1900: Proclamation of Commonwealth of Australia as Federal Union of the Six Colonies.
1939: The Soviet Union invades Poland, more than two weeks after Nazi Germany launched its assault.
1948: Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte, United Nations mediator in Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine, is slain near Jerusalem by Jewish terrorists.
1963: Malaysia breaks off diplomatic relations with Indonesia because of what it describes as President Sukarno’s increased hostility.
1964: United States discloses development of two weapons systems capable of intercepting and destroying armed satellites circling the Earth.
1970: Open warfare erupts in Jordan between King Hussein’s army and Palestinian guerrillas, precipitating world crisis.
1978: Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign an agreement for Middle East peace at Camp David, United States.
1980: Exiled Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somoza is assassinated in an explosion that wrecks his car in Asuncion, Paraguay.
1992: US special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh calls a halt to his five-and-a-half-year probe of the Iran-Contra scandal; Italy joins Britain in pulling out of European exchange rate treaties.
1993: The body of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the premier of Poland’s government-in-exile and commander of the Polish free forces during World War II, is reburied in Krakow. He died in an air crash in Gibraltar in 1943.
1995: Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas party garner an overwhelming majority of the votes in elections. Aristide, who became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1991, reiterated his vow to step down on February 7, 1996, when his term as president legally ends.
2003: Colombian officials sign a non-extradition pact covering US citizens sought by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands.
2004: Mexico’s President Vincente Fox and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sign a free trade agreement to ease Mexico’s reliance on the US while encouraging Japan to move factories there.
2005: Palestinian forces seal off five major breaches along Gaza’s porous southern border, firing warning shots in the air and clashing with stone-throwing crowds, in their strongest effort yet to halt the chaotic flood of people in and out of Egypt since Israel’s withdrawal from the area.
2006: Typhoon Shanshan sweeps toward south-western Japan with fierce winds and heavy rains, leaving at least five people dead or missing and injuring more than 100.
2009: President Barack Obama abruptly cancels a long-planned missile shield for Eastern Europe, replacing a Bush-era project that was bitterly opposed by Russia with a plan he contends will better defend against a growing threat of Iranian missiles.
2011: Revolutionary fighters struggle to make gains in an assault into Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte with bloody street-by-street battles against loyalist forces fiercely defending the most symbolic of the shattered regime’s remaining strongholds.
2012: Iran’s nuclear chief says that” terrorists and saboteurs” might have infiltrated the International Atomic Energy Agency in an effort to derail his nation’s atomic programme in Tehran’s harshest attack on the integrity of the UN agency that is investigating allegations that Iran is striving to make nuclear arms.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Marie-Jean Caritat, French philosopher (1743-1794); Sir Francis Chichester, British sailor (1901-1972); Hank Williams, US musician (1923-1953); Anne Bancroft, US actress (1931-2005); Ken Kesey, US author (1935-2001); John Ritter, US actor (1948-2003); Baz Luhrmann, Australian director (1962- )
— AP
