This Day in History – May 15
This is the 135th day of 2023. There are 230 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2010: A 16-year-old Australian, Jessica Wilson, becomes the youngest person to sail around the globe solo, non-stop and unassisted, setting foot on dry land after seven months in Sydney.
OTHER EVENTS
1536: Anne Boleyn, wife of King Henry VIII, and her brother Lord Rochford, are tried and found guilty in England of adultery and incest.
1602: Bartholomew Gosnold, English navigator, discovers Cape Cod on the US coast of what is now Massachusetts.
1916: The Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France carves up the Arab regions of the former Ottoman empire.
1918: The first experimental airmail route in the US begins between Washington, Philadelphia and New York.
1924: The US Congress passes a Bill instituting immigrant quotas based on nationality.
1928: The Royal Flying Doctor Service, originally called the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Service, is inaugurated in Cloncurry, Queensland.
1930: Ellen Church, the first airline stewardess, goes on duty aboard a United Airlines flight between San Francisco and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
1940: Richard and Maurice McDonald open the first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California.
1942: Gasoline rationing goes into effect in 17 US states, limiting sales to 11 litres (three gallons) a week for non-essential vehicles.
1948: The State of Israel, one day old, is attacked by Egyptian planes and invaded by troops from Lebanon and Transjordan.
1955: The Austrian State Treaty is signed, ending 10 years of Allied occupation.
1957: Britain explodes its first thermonuclear bomb in the central Pacific.
1970: Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi, are killed when police open fire during student protests.
1972: While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Alabama Governor George Wallace is wounded and left permanently paralysed below the waist, from an assassination attempt.
1988: The Ethiopian Government declares a state of emergency in the war-torn northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigre.
1989: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Beijing declares an end to the Sino-Soviet split.
1990: Thousands of Soviet soldiers try to break into Latvia’s Parliament during an anti-independence demonstration.
1992: Thousands of Opposition supporters seize Azerbaijan’s Parliament building and presidential palace.
1994: Aid officials report that the death toll may have reached 200,000 in Rwanda, where Hutus have been on a campaign of genocide against minority Tutsis since April 6.
1998: To international condemnation, India declares itself a nuclear nation after five bomb tests the same week.
1999: A Communist-led attempt to impeach Russian President Boris Yeltsin for the war in Chechnya fails.
2002: Former Croatian Serb rebel leader Milan Martic and ex-Yugoslav army officer General Mile Mrksic turn themselves in to the UN war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands.
2003: American singer and songwriter June Carter Cash — a leading figure in country music and noted for her work with the Carter family and Johnny Cash — dies in Nashville.
2009: President Barack Obama says he will reform and retain the military tribunals he once reviled for Guantanamo Bay detainees, jeopardising his timetable for closing the naval prison in Cuba by January 2010.
2011: Thousands of Arab protesters march on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, sparking clashes that leave at least 15 people dead in the annual Palestinian mourning ritual marking the anniversary of Israel’s birth.
2012: Socialist Francois Hollande assumes France’s presidency.
2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin says Ukraine must pay in advance for Russian gas supplies starting the following month, increasing pressure on its struggling neighbour.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
William Lamb, British statesman (1779-1852); Pierre Curie, French scientist (1859-1906); Jasper Johns, US artist (1930- ); Trini Lopez, American singer (1937-2020); Brian Eno, British composer and producer (1948- ); Veronica Campbell Brown, Jamaican multiple Olympic and World champion (1982- )
– AP/ Jamaica Observer