This Day in History – January 18
Today is the 18th day of 2014. There are 347 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGLIGHT
2007: A woman who disappeared in the jungles of north-eastern Cambodia is found 19 years later. The woman — identified as Rochom P’ngieng, 27 — does not speak any intelligible language, but is recognised by a village policeman who claims to be her father.
OTHER EVENST
1535: The city of Lima, capital of present-day Peru, is founded by Spanish conquistadors on the central Pacific coast of South America.
1778: English navigator Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands, which he dubs the “Sandwich Islands”.
1788: The first English settlers arrive in Australia’s Botany Bay to establish a penal colony.
1912: English explorer Robert F Scott and his expedition reach the South Pole, only to discover Norwegian Roald Amundsen had got there first.
1915: With the European powers preoccupied with World War I, Japan secretly presents China with Twenty-one Demands for privileges.
1918: The first democratically elected national legislature in Russia opens in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks soon shut it down, marking the start of Communist dictatorship.
1919: The World War I Peace Congress opens in Versailles, France.
1943: The Soviets announce they had broken the long Nazi siege of Leningrad.
1967: Albert DeSalvo, who claimed to be the “Boston Strangler,” is convicted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses.
1990: Peggy McMartin Buckey, of 52 child molestation charges.
1992: More than 100,000 people attend Kenya’s first legal anti-government rally in 22 years.
1997: Norway’s Boerge Ousland emerges on the Pacific edge of Antarctica to become the first person to cross the continent alone and unaided.
2002: The Sierra Leone government declares the country’s 11-year-old civil war, which killed about 50,000 people over.
TODAY’S BITRTHDAYS
Francois Michel Detellier, French statesman (1641-1691); Cary Grant, English-American actor (1904-1986); Chun Doo-hwan, former South Korean president (1931-); Paul Keating, former Australian prime minister (1944-); Kevin Costner, US actor/director (1955-); Jesse L Martin, US actor (1969-)
— AP