This Day in History – October 11
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1984: Space shuttle Challenger astronaut Kathy Sullivan becomes the first American woman to walk in space.
OTHER EVENTS
1531: Swiss Catholics defeat Protestants at Battle of Kappel, and the Protestant leader Huldrych Zwingli is killed.
1776: The first naval battle of Lake Champlain is fought during the American Revolution.
1797: Dutch fleet is defeated by British off Camperdown, Holland.
1811: The first steam-powered ferryboat, the Juliana, is put into operation in the United States between New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey.
1890: The Daughters of the American Revolution, a non-profit organisation for the descendants of individuals who aided in achieving American Independence, is founded in Washington, DC
1899: The Boer War begins in South Africa, with Transvaal and the Orange Free State attacking the British.
1933: Latin American countries sign Rio de Janeiro non-aggression pact.
1942: World War II Battle of Cape Esperance begins in the Solomon Islands, resulting in an American victory over the Japanese.
1946: Roman Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Stepinatz of Yugoslavia is convicted on charges of provoking racial hatred and of forcibly converting Serbs to Catholicism.
1954: Russia announces it will end its 10-year occupation of Port Arthur by June 1955 and give Communist China sole authority over the Manchurian naval base.
1958: The American lunar probe Pioneer 1 is launched; but fails to go as far as planned, falling back to Earth, and burning up in the atmosphere.
1963: United Nations condemns repression in South Africa by 106-1 vote.
1968: Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, is launched; a cyclone that struck Bay of Bengal in India leaves half a million people homeless.
1987: Indian peacekeeping troops, using artillery and mortars, kill more than 120 Tamil rebels on Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka.
1992: Voters in Lebanon’s Kesrouan district elect five deputies, completing the country’s first parliamentary elections in 20 years. But its legitimacy is eroded with most of the country’s Christians boycotting the vote.
1993: US President Bill Clinton defends his Administration’s foreign policy and assails efforts by members of Congress to limit the president’s authority to commit US armed forces to peacekeeping efforts in foreign countries.
1996: American military forces begin withdrawing from Bosnia.
1998: Drawing criticism from Jewish leaders, the pope canonises Edith Stein, who was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism and died in Auschwitz.
1999: Israel confirms that 400 Cuban Jews were brought to the country in the past five years in an operation that had the blessing of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
2000: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat meet in Jerusalem with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to mediate a truce and win the return of three Israeli soldiers captured by Lebanese guerrillas.
2002: French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie says investigators found traces of explosives that indicate an explosion and fire aboard a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen on October 6 was the result of a terrorist attack.
2004: The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, expresses concern at the disappearance of high-precision equipment from Iraq’s nuclear facilities that could be used to make nuclear weapons.
2006: Japan orders a total ban on North Korean imports and declares that ships from the impoverished nation are prohibited from entering Japanese ports as punishment for its apparent nuclear test.
2009: A week of terror strikes across Pakistan, capped by a stunning assault on army headquarters, shows the Taliban have rebounded and appear determined to shake the nation’s resolve as the military plans for an offensive against the group’s stronghold on the Afghan border.
2010: NATO says US forces may have detonated a grenade that killed a captive British aid worker during a rescue attempt to free Linda Grove in eastern Afghanistan. British Prime Minister David Cameron defends the mission, saying his Government authorised it only after learning that Norgrove’s life was in grave danger.
2011: The Obama Administration accuses agents of the Iranian government of being involved in a plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Eleanor Roosevelt, US first lady and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1884-1962); Francois Mauriac, French writer and Nobel laureate (1885-1970); Daryl Hall, US singer (1946- ); Luke Perry, US actor (1966- )
— AP