This day in history – July 13
Today is the 194th day of 2015. There are 171 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2009: US Government budget deficit hits milestone, tops $1 trillion, intensifying fears about higher interest rates and inflation.
OTHER EVENTS
1793: A radical leader of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, is murdered in his bath by patriot Charlotte Corday at the height of his power and influence. A journalist, Marat’s writings helped bring about the Reign of Terror soon after his death.
1854: Abbas I, viceroy of Egypt under the Ottomans who opposed Western-inspired reforms, is strangled by two of his servants, and succeeded by Mohammed Said.
1863: Rioting against US Civil War military conscription breaks out in New York City. About 1,000 people are killed in three days of disorder.
1878: Russo-Turkish War ends, resulting in gradual expansion of Russian power in Ottoman territory.
1971: Firing squads in Morocco execute 10 army officers accused of trying to overthrow King Hassan.
1986: Two Muslims are burned alive by Hindus at main government hospital in India’s Gujarat State on fifth day of Hindu-Muslim riots.
1987: Two Iranian gunboats attack French container ship in the Gulf off Saudi Arabia, and Iraq says its warplanes make retaliatory raids.
1992: President George Bush announces that the United States will no longer produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium for weapons.
1993: Croat militiamen in Mostar embark on a new wave of ethnic cleansing, detaining hundreds of Muslim men and evicting women, children and the elderly from their homes.
1998: Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto resigns after his party is humiliated in parliamentary elections.
2001: Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf arrives in India for a landmark summit aimed at smoothing stormy relations between these two nuclear rivals.
2004: The Red Cross says it suspects that the United States is holding terror suspects secretly in locations across the world despite granting the organisation access to thousands of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere.
2006: South Korean businessman Tongsun Park, accused of being an Iraqi agent and trying to influence the United Nations’ oil-for-food programme, is found guilty of conspiracy.
2008: An assault by militants on a US base close to the Pakistan border kills nine American soldiers and wounds 15 in the deadliest attack on US forces in Afghanistan in three years.
2010: Swiss authorities declare Oscar-winning film director Roman Polanski a free man — no longer confined to house arrest in his Alpine villa and free to return to France, rejecting a US request for his extradition because of a 32-year-old sex conviction.
2011: Rupert Murdoch’s dream of controlling a British broadcasting behemoth evaporates after he withdraws his bid for BSkyB — the latest, biggest casualty in the hacking scandal sweeping through British politics, media and police.
2013: Typhoon Soulik kills at least nine people and affects more than 160 million in East China and Taiwan.
2014: Joint efforts by US Secretary of State John Kerry and three other Western foreign ministers fail to advance faltering nuclear talks with Iran with a target date for a deal only a week away.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
John Dee, English alchemist and mathematician (1527-1608); Gustav Freytag, German novelist (1816-1895); Souphanouvong, Laotian communist leader (1909-1995); Wole Soyinka, Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate (1934- ); Harrison Ford, US actor (1942- ); Erno Rubik, Hungarian inventor of Rubik’s Cube (1944-); Cheech Marin, actor/comedian (1946- )
–AP