On this day – 09/23/2004

Sunday Times, Australia
Sept 23 2004
On this day
23sep04
1991 – Armenia declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1779 – US Admiral John Paul Jones captures British warship Serapis
off Flamborough Head, England.
1803 – British force takes Dutch Guinea.
1817 – Spain signs treaty with Britain to end slave trade.
1846 – The planet Neptune is discovered by German astronomer Johann
Gottfried Galle.
1870 – Death of Prosper Merimee, French dramatist and short story
writer, notably of Carmen.
1912 – Silent film director Mack Sennett’s first Keystone Cops film,
Cohen Collects a Debt, is released.
1914 – Dusseldorf is targeted by British aircraft in Germany during
World War I.
1932 – Hijaz and Nejd and other districts are merged to form the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
1939 – Death of Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychiatrist and founder of
psychoanalysis.
1940 – The George Cross, the highest British civilian award for acts
of courage, is instituted.
1952 – Rocky Marciano becomes world heavyweight boxing champion when
he knocks out Jersey Joe Walcott in 13 rounds in Philadelphia.
1965 – Roma Mitchell is appointed to the South Australian Supreme
Court: the first female judge in Australia.
1972 – President Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law in the
Philippines.
1973 – Juan Peron and his wife Isabel are elected president and
vice-president of Argentina.
1976 – South Africa decides to allow multi-racial teams to represent
the country in international sport.
1978 – Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat returns home to hero’s welcome
after Camp David summit that results in agreement on framework for
peace with Israel.
1982 – Amin Gemayel is sworn in as Lebanon’s president to replace his
brother Bashir, killed in a bomb explosion.
1988 – Rival Muslim and Christian governments threaten Lebanon with
formal partition.
1990 – Saddam Hussein says he will destroy Israel and launch an
all-out war before allowing the UN embargo to “strangle” Iraq; Swiss
citizens vote to ban the construction of nuclear power plants for the
rest of the century.
1991 – Iraqi soldiers detain UN officials in Baghdad and forcibly
confiscate documents showing Iraq had been developing nuclear
weapons; Armenia declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1992 – France’s deadliest storm in 34 years kills at least 32 people;
General Le Duc Anh, Vietnam’s top military man and a powerful
Communist party official, is elected state president by the national
assembly.
1993 – Sydney is chosen over Beijing as the site for the 2000 Summer
Olympics; The South African parliament votes to allow blacks a role
in governing.
1996 – Greek Premier Costas Simitis defeats his conservative
challenger to win a new four-year term.
1997 – Lawyers announce that British nurses Lucille McLauchlan and
Deborah Parry have been convicted for the murder of their Australian
colleague Yvonne Gilford in Saudi Arabia; Armed men raid an Algerian
village, shooting or stabbing to death at least 200 people and
wounding 100 others; At Northern Ireland peace talks, Unionists have
their first face-to-face meeting with Sinn Fein in 75 years.
1998 – Hurricane Georges reaches Cuba and threatens the Florida Keys
after making a shambles of much of Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic and Haiti.
1999 – Violent protests grip the streets of Jakarta for a second day
as police struggle to contain crowds enraged by the passage of a bill
giving the military power to revoke civil liberties; Indonesia says
it is ending martial law in East Timor with immediate effect.
2000 – At the Sydney Olympics, Grant Hackett dethrones Kieren Perkins
as swimming’s 1500m king; Maurice Greene and Marion Jones capture the
100m sprint double for the US; British rower Steve Redgrave wins his
fifth gold medal at his fifth Olympics, matching Hungarian fencers
Aladar Gerevich and Pal Kovacs. Redgrave was later knighted for his
feat; Australian women win waterpolo’s first ever Olympic title with
a last-second goal against the US.
2001 – President George W Bush returns the American flag to full
staff at Camp David, symbolically ending a period of national
mourning. Thousands gather at New York’s Yankee Stadium to offer
prayers for the victims of terrorism; New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
pledges “our skyline will rise again.”
2002 – Former Vice-President Al Gore criticises US President Bush’s
policy of confrontation with Iraq saying it undermines an
international campaign against terrorism in the wake of the September
11 attacks.
2003 – An Indian court sentences one man to death by hanging and 12
others to life in prison for killing a Christian missionary from
Australia and his two young sons in an arson attack in 1999.