This Day in History — June 28
Today is the 179th day of 2019. There are 186 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2000: Seven months after floating adrift in the Florida straits, six-year-old Elian Gonzalez returns to his native Cuba, bringing to a close a fierce custody battle.
OTHER EVENTS
1812: Napoleon Bonaparte’s army crosses Vilna River as Russian forces retreat.
1919: Germany and the Allies sign the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending World War I and providing for the creation of the League of Nations
1998: Slavko Dokmanovic, Serb former mayor of Vukovar, Croatia, hangs himself in his cell while the International War Crimes Tribunal considers a verdict on his role in a massacre of 200 people.
1999: Computer hackers deface the US Army’s main web-site after having hacked into the White House, FBI and US Senate Web sites.
2001: Yugoslavia hands over former President Slobodan Milosevic to the UN war crimes tribunal.
2004: The United States hands over sovereignty to the Iraqis two days ahead of schedule and seven months before elections are set to take place.
2006: UN member states lift a $950 million (euro 756 million) spending cap on the United Nations budget, averting a financial crisis but dealing a blow to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s reform agenda.
2008: Zimbabweans deface ballots and boycott the discredited re-election of President Robert Mugabe after an onslaught of state-sponsored violence pushes his main opposition from the race.
2009: Soldiers oust the democratically elected president of Honduras and Congress names a successor, but Manuel Zalaya, the leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, denounces what he calls an illegal coup and vows to stay in power.
2012: Archeologists say pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest pottery in the world.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
England’s King Henry VIII (1491-1547); Mel Brooks, US actor/director (1926- ); Pat Morita, US actor (1932-2005); Kathy Bates, actress (1948- ); John Cusack, actor (1966- )
— AP
