This Day in History— July 3
Today is the 184th day of 2019. There are 181 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1993: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide signs an accord in New York with the Haitian military that will return him to office.
OTHER EVENTS
321: Roman emperor Constantine, a Christian, proclaims Sunday a day of rest and religious observance.
1583: Russia’s Czar Ivan the Terrible kills his son Ivan in a fit of rage.
1863: Confederates are forced to retreat on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, turning the fortunes in the American Civil War; 37,000 die on both sides in three days of battle.
1954: Food rationing, imposed during World War II, ends in Britain.
1962: Algeria becomes independent after 132 years of French rule.
1994: French troops and the rebels who oppose their presence skirmish briefly in Rwanda, the first time the French humanitarian mission has entered into combat.
1996: Boris Yeltsin decisively defeats communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov for a second term as Russian president.
1997: The Parliament of Western Samoa votes to amend the constitution to simplify the country’s name to Samoa.
2000: Opposition candidate Vicente Fox is declared the winner in Mexico’s presidential elections in a stunning victory that ends the ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) party’s 71-year lock on the presidency.
2007: A 10-year-old Nepalese girl is stripped of her title as a living goddess because she travelled overseas to promote a documentary about the centuries-old tradition. Because of popular support, Sajani Shakya’s position is reinstated, but she retires in March 2008 at the age of 11.
2008:The Pentagon announces it had extended the tour of 2,200 Marines in Afghanistan, after insisting for months the unit would come home on time. Venus and Serena Williams win in straight sets to set up their third all-sister Wimbledon final and seventh Grand Slam championship match-up.
2009: After bitter wrangling, Africa’s leaders agree to denounce the International Criminal Court and refuse to extradite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity in Darfur.
2012: Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond resigns, the biggest scalp in a financial market scandal that has ripped through the bank’s senior management and sown the seeds for a new investigation into Britain’s banking sector.
2013: Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, is overthrown by the military after just one year by the same kind of Arab Spring uprising that had brought the Islamist leader to power.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
John Clare, English poet (1793-1864); Franz Kafka, Austrian author (1883-1924); Tom Stoppard, British playwright (1937-); Jean-Claude “Papa Doc” Duvalier, former president of Haiti (1951-2014); Ken Russell, British film director (1927-2011); Tom Cruise, US actor (1962-)
— AP