Today in History, August 18

HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY ON THIS DATE:

1227 - Death of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan.

1743 - First rules of boxing approved - they were drafted by John Broughton, third heavyweight boxing champion of England.

1826 - Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing becomes first European to reach Timbuktu, now in Mali; he was murdered there the following month.

1870 - Western Australia is granted representative government.

1896 - France annexes Madagascar whose external treaties with other states are annulled.

1914 - US President Woodrow Wilson proclaims American neutrality in World War I; Germany declares war on Russia.

1920 - Tennessee becomes the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the right of all American women to vote.

1939 - Soviet Union and Germany sign commercial agreement.

1964 - South Africa is banned from the Olympic Games because of its apartheid policies.

1968 - More than 100 women and children are killed when a landslide sweeps two sightseeing buses into rain-swollen river on Honshu Island in Japan.

1989 - Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan is assassinated.

1990 - British warships are authorised to use force to enforce UN sanctions against Iraq.

1991 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin calls for a general strike to protest against the ouster of Mikhail Gorbachev.

1992 - Georgian troops take control of most of the rebellious Abkhazia region.

1993 - The United States accuses Sudan of repeatedly supporting international terrorism, disqualifying that Islamic country from most US assistance programs.

1995 - Flash floods in the Marrakesh region of Morocco kill at least 73 people.

1996 - In Pakistan, gunmen fire on a group of Shi'ite worshippers in central Punjab province, killing 18 people and injuring 100.

1998 - Congolese rebels send President Laurent Kabila's troops fleeing as they advance to the capital.

2000 - Indians belonging to a tribe believed to have been decimated 80 years ago are located in the jungles of the Amazon state of Acre in Brazil.

2001 - Wildfires burn 5000 acres in a drought-stricken Washington state. More than 93,000 acres have been destroyed across the state's arid east side in the past week.

2002 - Pope John Paul, addressing some 2.7 million people, his largest crowd ever in Poland, warns that the new millennium is threatened by an onslaught of evil.

2003 - Fourteen European tourists kidnapped in late February and March by Algerian Islamic militants are freed in northern Mali.

2005 - Security forces kill al-Qaeda's top leader al-Aoofi and five other Islamic terrorists in the first major anti-terror sweep since Abdullah became the Saudi king earlier in the month.

2007 - Two men hijack a Turkish passenger plane bound for Istanbul, holding several people hostage for more than four hours before surrendering, officials said.

2008 - Pervez Musharraf resigns as the president of Pakistan.

2010 - The US Central Intelligence Agency opens a counter-proliferation centre to combat the spread of dangerous weapons and technology, a move that comes as Iran is on the verge of fuelling up a new nuclear power plant.

2011 - Veteran ABC news gatherers Paul Lockyer, Gary Ticehurst and John Bean are killed in a helicopter crash at South Australia's Lake Eyre while working on a story.

2013 - UN experts arrive in Damascus to begin their investigation into the purported use of chemical weapons in Syria's civil war.

2014 - Iraqi and Kurdish forces recapture Iraq's largest dam from Islamic militants following dozens of US airstrikes in the extremists' first major defeat since they swept across the country this summer.

2015 - Indonesian crews locate the bodies of all 54 people in the wreckage of Trigana Air Service Flight 257 in a remote area of Papua.

2016 - The Australian federal government comes under pressure to resettle more than 800 asylum seekers being housed in the Manus Island detention centre the day after agreeing to shut it down.

2017 - Spanish police kill five people wearing fake bomb belts in the popular seaside town of Cambrils after they ploughed a car into tourists and locals, injuring six. The attack comes just hours after 13 people were killed and more than 100 injured when a van mowed down pedestrians on Barcelona's Las Ramblas.

Today's Birthdays:

Meriwether Lewis, US explorer (1774-1809); Lord John Russell, English statesman (1792-1878); Casper Weinberger, US politician (1917-2006); Shelley Winters, US actor (1920-2006); Roman Polanski, French-born film director (1933-); Robert Redford, US actor (1937-); Patrick Swayze, US actor (1952-2009); Christian Slater, US actor (1969-); Edward Norton, US actor (1969-); Cameron White, Australian cricketer (1983-); Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love (1992-).

Thought For Today:

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common - John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704).

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