This Day in History – July 5
Today is the 186th day of 2021. There are 179 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2004: Former Jamaican Prime Minister Hugh Lawson Shearer dies.
OTHER EVENTS
1556: France’s King Henry II renews war against Hapsburgs, one of the principal sovereign dynasties of Europe, in Italy.
1587: Sir Francis Drake leads an expedition into the port of Cadiz, Spain, and ravages the Spanish coast. He destroys so many vessels that the Spaniards have to delay their invasion of England for a year.
1687: Isaac Newton first publishes his Principia Mathematica, a three-volume work setting out his mathematical principles of natural philosophy.
1811: Venezuela becomes first South American country to declare its independence from Spain.
1812: Britain makes peace with Russia and Sweden.
1830: French invade Algeria and take Algiers, seizing private and religious buildings and a vast portion of the country’s arable land. The colonisation of Algeria is seen as a way of providing employment for veterans of the Napoleonic wars.
1865: Methodist minister William Booth founds the Christian Revival Association, later to become the Salvation Army, in London. The Secret Service Division of the US Treasury Department is founded in Washington, DC, with the mission of suppressing counterfeit currency.
1932: Right-wing politician Antonio de Oliveira Salazar becomes Portugal’s prime minister. He soon creates an authoritarian political order that lasts until 1974.
1935: US President Franklin D Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act.
1940: Vichy Government in France breaks off relations with Britain in World War II.
1943: German offensive on Russian front begins with Battle of Kursk in World War II.
1946: The bikini, created by Louis Reard, is modelled by Micheline Bernardini during a poolside fashion show in Paris.
1954: Elvis Presley’s first commercial recording session takes place at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee; the song he records is That’s All Right.
1962: Independence takes effect in Algeria; the same day civilians of European descent, mostly French, come under attack by extremists in the port city of Oran.
1969: Tom Mboya, likely successor to Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, is assassinated in Nairobi.
1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, comes to power in Rwanda in a bloodless coup, and remains president until his death in a plane crash in 1994.
1975: The Cape Verde Islands become independent after 500 years of Portuguese rule. Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win a Wimbledon singles title as he defeats Jimmy Connors.
1977: Pakistan army seizes power in bloodless coup that unseats Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
1984: The Supreme Court weakens the 70-year-old “exclusionary rule”, deciding that evidence seized in good faith with defective court warrants can be used against defendants in criminal trials.
1988: Iran’s president says the country has the “right to avenge” the airliner shot down by a US warship.
1991: A worldwide financial scandal erupts as regulators in eight countries shut down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
1994: Thousands of jubilant Palestinians greet Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat when he returns to the West Bank for the first time in 27 years and swears in the self-rule government.
1997: Hun Sen, one of the battling prime ministers of Cambodia, gains control of one military base near Phnom Penh and surrounds another.
1998: Protestants erect roadblocks in Northern Ireland after the Orange Order is stopped by police from marching through the Catholic neighbourhood of Portadown.
1999: Caribbean leaders gather for a summit in Trinidad to discuss issues such as the sugar and banana trade, and the development of a regional supreme court.
2000: The UN Security Council imposes an 18-month diamond ban on Sierra Leone’s rebels in a bid to strangle their ability to finance a civil war.
2001: Former Argentine President Carlos Menem is indicted by a federal judge for heading up an “illicit organisation” that sold rifles and artillery to Croatia in 1991 and Ecuador in 1995 in violation of UN embargoes.
2002: South Africa’s Constitutional Court orders President Thabo Mbeki to provide the antiretroviral drug nevirapine to pregnant women in state hospitals who are infected with HIV.
2003: Two female suicide bombers kill themselves and at least 14 others at Tushino airfield on the outskirts of Moscow, where an annual outdoor rock music festival is being held.
2004: The prosecutor for a UN-sponsored war crimes court opens the first trials for rebel military commanders accused in a vicious 10-year campaign for control of diamond-rich Sierra Leone.
2005: Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government criticises the US military for killing up to 17 civilians in an air strike and orders an immediate investigation.
2006: North Atlantic Treaty Organization calls for a firm international response to North Korea’s missile tests, which the military alliance condemns as a threat to security in Asia and the wider world.
2007: Nigerian gunmen smash the windows of a car carrying a British girl to school and kidnap the three-year-old in the first seizure of a foreign child in Nigeria’s increasingly lawless oil region. She is released four days later.
2008: Seven-hour shoot-out between Russian soldiers and suspected militants in the republic of Ingushetia leaves two dead on each side. Venus Williams wins her fifth Wimbledon singles title, beating younger sister Serena 7-5, 6-4 in the final. Gas station owner Kent Couch flies a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled balloons more than 200 miles across the Oregon desert, landing in a field in Cambridge, Idaho.
2009: Honduras’s exiled president flies toward home in a Venezuelan jet in a high-stakes attempt to return to power, even as the interim government orders the military to turn away the plane.
2010: US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebukes Russia for failing to live up to the ceasefire agreement it signed nearly two years before to end the fighting in the small former Soviet state of Georgia where she says Moscow is building permanent military bases.
2011: A jury in Orlando, Florida, finds Casey Anthony, 25, not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child abuse in the 2008 disappearance and death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. A Bahraini opposition figure says reconciliation talks between the Sunni monarchy and the Shiite opposition started for the first time since anti-government protests erupted in the Gulf kingdom.
2013: Pope Francis clears two of the 20th century’s most influential popes to become saints in the Roman Catholic church, approving a miracle needed to canonise Pope John Paul II and waiving Vatican rules to honour Pope John XXIII. Enraged Islamists push back against the toppling of President Mohammed Morsi, as tens of thousands of his supporters take to the streets vowing to win his reinstatement and clash with their opponents in violence that kills some three dozen people.
2017: The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals rules that two laws passed by Congress did not end the right to a bond hearing for unaccompanied immigrant children who are detained by federal authorities.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Sir Stamford Raffles, British founder of Singapore (1781-1826); Phineas Taylor Barnum, US circus pioneer (1810-1891); Cecil Rhodes, English statesman and Central Africa pioneer (1853-1902); Jean Cocteau, French author-film-maker (1889-1963); Georges Pompidou, French prime minister and president (1911-1974); Huey Lewis, US singer (1951- ); Edie Falco, actress (1963- )
— AP/Jamaica Observer
