This Day In History – July 8
Today is the 189th day of 2014. There are 176 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
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.
OTHER EVENTS
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.
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.
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 — the president’s 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 Houston, US actress/director (1951-); Kevin Bacon US actor (1958-); Beck, US rock singer (1970-).
— AP
