This Day in History — August 17
This is the 229th day of 2022. There are 136 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1991: Italy repatriates the last of an estimated 18,000 Albanian refugees who arrived in southern Italy by boat earlier in the month. The Italian Government admitted the offer of asylum was a ruse to persuade Albanians to give up their often-violent resistance. Only 154 refugees stayed in Italy.
OTHER EVENTS
1896: Gold is discovered in Klondike territory, Canada, attracting 100,000 adventurers in a two-year rush.
1920: Romania joins Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in alliance that becomes Triple Entente, where each country pledges not to conclude peace separately.
1945: Sukarno proclaims Indonesian Independence, but it is refused by the Dutch.
1954: Two-thousand religious pilgrims drown in a flash flood at the Muslim shrine of the Imam Zadeh Davud in Farahzad, Iran.
1962: East German border guards shoot and kill an 18-year-old who attempts to cross over the Berlin Wall into the western sector.
1964: Congolese Premier Moise Tshombe appeals to five African nations to help put down rebellion in the Congo.
1969: Hurricane Camille hits the US Gulf Coast, killing 248 people.
1972: Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan offers an interim peace agreement with Egypt based on a truce line dividing the Sinai Peninsula.
1976: Tidal wave on Philippine island of Mindanao leaves estimated 8,000 people dead or missing.
1980: Diplomatic officials close the British Embassy in Iran because of hostile demonstrations.
1985: A car packed with dynamite explodes outside a crowded supermarket in Lebanon’s Christian east Beirut, killing at least 50 people and wounding 80.
1986: Rescuers continue evacuating by boat more than 100,000 people marooned in flood-swept, south-eastern India.
1988: Pakistan’s President Zia ul-Haq and US Ambassador Arnold Raphel are killed when their Pakistani military plane explodes.
1990: Iraq announces policy of holding foreign nationals in Iraq and Kuwait as human shields against attack.
1992: Mortar shells blast a crowded refugee hotel in Sarajevo, Bosnia, setting it ablaze. At least two people die.
1993: Miners massacre 73 Yanomami Indians in the Brazilian Amazon.
1994: Food distribution to 350,000 Rwandan refugees in camps in Congo is suspended because of riots and thefts by machete-wielding gangs.
1996: Despite an appeal for restraint from King Hussein, stone-throwing demonstrators in Amman, Jordan, clash with police for a second day to protest the doubling of bread prices.
1997: The NATO-led peace force intervenes to keep a stand-off between policemen backing Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic and her opponents from breaking into violence.
1999: A powerful magnitude-7.4 earthquake hits western Turkey, killing at least 17,200 people and injuring more than 20,000. Officials estimate that the numbers are higher as many families buried relatives without notifying authorities.
2001: A protest in Guyana over the prior shooting deaths of three Muslims leaves four persons dead after police open fire on the protesters.
2003: Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, 41, is shot dead, apparently by US soldiers, while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Dana was videotaping outside the prison after a mortar attack in which six prisoners were killed and about 60 others were wounded.
2004: Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a leader of a paramilitary group in Haiti, is acquitted of killing some 3,000 people. The 14-hour murder trial angers human rights groups and provokes criticism of the new, US-backed Government.
2006: Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemns a US air strike that Afghan officials say killed 10 border policemen.
2008: Israel’s Cabinet approves the release of some 200 Palestinian prisoners as a goodwill gesture to the Government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
2009: Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, is expected to drop his appeal — a step that could lead to his rapid release and puts Scotland’s left-of-centre Government into a rare international spotlight.
2010: A Palestinian who broke into the Turkish Embassy in Israel while trying to take hostages and demanding asylum is turned over to Israeli authorities, ending a tense stand-off.
2013: Egyptian security forces storm a Cairo mosque after a heavy exchange of gunfire with armed men shooting down from a minaret, rounding up hundreds of supporters of the country’s ousted president who had sought refuge there overnight after clashes killed 173 people.
2014: Kurdish forces wrest back part of Iraq’s largest dam from Islamic State militants who had captured it less than two weeks before.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Pierre de Fermat, French mathematician (1601-1665); Jan III Sobieski, king of Poland (1629-1696); William Carey, English pioneer missionary (1761-1834); Marcus Garvey, black leader and Jamaica’s first national hero (1887-1940); Mae West, US actress (1892-1980); Maureen O’Hara, Irish-born actress (1920-2015 ); V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul, Trinidadian writer (1932-2018); Robert De Niro, US actor (1943- ); Sean Penn, US actor (1960- ).
– AP and Jamaica Observer