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Change Your Life! |
Today In History Monday, June 5 |
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News |
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May 31, 2000
Highlights in history on this date: 1795 - Huge fire ravages Copenhagen, Denmark. 1827 - Turkish forces capture the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, after a long siege. 1849 - Denmark becomes a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and freedom of press, association and religion. 1862 - Vietnam cedes southern part of the country, called Cochinchina, to France. 1885 - British establish protectorate over Niger River region, now Nigeria. 1900 - British forces take Pretoria, South Africa, from the Boers. 1915 - Danish women win voting rights. 1944 - Allied troops enter Rome. 1945 - Allied Control Commission assumes control of Germany, which is divided into four occupation zones. 1947 - U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall calls for a massive program of foreign aid to help the European states recover after World War II. It becomes known as the Marshall Plan. 1965 - U.S. State Department acknowledges publicly for first time that U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam are engaging in combat in defense of key installations. 1967 - Israel launches airstrikes on Egypt, destroying most of that country's air force on the ground to open the six-day Middle East War. 1968 - U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, is fatally shot in Los Angeles at age 42. 1972 - First U.N. World Conference on Human Environment opens in Stockholm, Sweden; Greece and China announce establishment of diplomatic relations. 1975 - Suez Canal reopens to international shipping for first time since 1967 Arab-Israeli War. 1988 - Australian Kay Cottee becomes the first woman to sail alone nonstop around the world. 1988 - Three railroad boxcars packed with industrial explosives blow up near Gorky in Soviet Union, killing 68 people. 1990 - Soviet legislature postpones adoption of law easing restrictions on emigration, endangering trade agreement with United States. 1991 - Algeria's president declares a state of emergency in the capital and postpones the country's first multiparty parliamentary elections in a crackdown on protest by Muslim fundamentalists. 1992 - Fighting between an Iran-backed rebel group and pro-Saudi rivals continues as a cease-fire collapses in Kabul, Afghanistan 1993 - Forces of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid ambush U.N. soldiers in Mogadishu, killing 22 Pakistani soldiers. 1994 - The Bosnian government again rejects U.N,-sponsored cease-fire talks in Geneva, seeming to seek to increase their leverage in a territorial settlement. 1995 - Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic says he has convinced Bosnian Serbs to release the 235 U.N. personnel held hostage in Bosnia after airstrikes against the Serbs. The hostages are later gradually released. 1996 - In their first exchange, new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that there will "never" be a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. 1997 - The first multiparty parliament elections are held in Algeria, but the Islamic party that was set to win the canceled 1992 elections is banned from participating, and international observers criticize the conduct. 1998 - The United Nations accuses Yugoslav forces of "atrocities" against their own population in Kosovo, and hundreds of Albanians flee an army offensive in the province. 1999 - NATO and Yugoslav officers meet for the first time in Macedonia to discuss the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo.
Today's Birthdays: Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary (1878-1923); John Maynard Keynes, British economist (1883-1946); Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet (1898-1936).
Thought For Today: In a dream you are never 80. - Anne Sexton, American poet (1928-1974).
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