Today in History: January 18
The cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized after being holed by a rock off the coast of Italy in 2012. The death toll would rise from 11 to 32 people.
Highlights in History on this Day:
1520 – King Christian II of Denmark and Norway defeats Swedes at Lake Asunden and subsequently conquers Sweden.
1535 – The city of Lima, capital of present-day Peru, is founded by Spanish conquistadors on the central Pacific coast of South America.
1701 – Brandenburg’s Frederick III is crowned Frederick I, King of Prussia.
1788 – HMS Supply, first ship of Britain’s First Fleet to Australia, reaches Botany Bay.
1871 – While Prussian guns bombard Paris, the Reich is formed when William I of Prussia is crowned the first emperor of Germany.
1913 – Greek and Turkish naval forces battle off Tendos Isle.
1915 – With the European powers preoccupied with World War I, Japan secretly presents China with Twenty-one Demands for privileges.
1919 – The World War I Peace Congress opens in Versailles, France.
1968 – United States and Soviet Union agree on draft treaty to control nuclear weapons.
1974 – Egypt and Israel sign an agreement to disengage their forces along the Suez Canal.
1989 – Thousands of Czechoslovaks converge on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, chanting “freedom”, “truth”, and “human rights” on fourth consecutive day of public dissent.
1992 – More than 100,000 people attend Kenya’s first legal anti-government rally in 22 years.
1995 – More than 9000 victims of torture under the regime of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos are awarded $US766 million from the Marcos estate by a US jury.
1997 – Norway’s Boerge Ousland emerges on the Pacific edge of Antarctica to become the first person to cross the continent alone and unaided.
1999 – Brazil lets its currency float freely, opting to use austerity measures to keep spending in check.
2001 – Helicopters lower rescuers into the crater of a volcano in San Salvador, El Salvador after voices are heard there, reviving unlikely hopes that a group of peasants thrown from the crater’s rim might still be alive. Nearly 700 people were killed by the earthquake.
2002 – The Sierra Leone government declares that the country’s 11-year-old civil war, which killed about 50,000 people – mostly civilians – over.
2005 – Airbus launches the A380, hailed as the largest civil airliner ever built, capable of carrying up to 800 passengers.
2007 – A woman who disappeared in the jungles of northeastern Cambodia as a child is found 19 years later.
2009 – Barack Obama tells hundreds of thousands of supporters at a pre-inauguration rally that “anything is possible in America”.
2012 – Italians tally 11 dead, 21 missing from the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster.
2013 – The artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre Sergei Filin is hospitalised with severe burns after an assailant threw acid on his face.
2014 – Egypt’s election council claims that 98.1 per cent of voters supported the new military-backed constitution with a 38.6 turnout.
2015 – A record six million people attend a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in the Philippine capital Manila.
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Source: Stuff
