July 14
1789 Citizens of Paris storm and capture the Bastille prison and release prisoners, marking the start of the French Revolution.
1790 France’s King Louis XVI accepts the revolutionary constitution.
1865 English climber Edward Whymper leads the first team to reach the summit of the Matterhorn in the Alps.
1886 Britain and Germany agree on frontiers of Gold Coast and Togoland.
1900 International expedition, including US and Japan, takes Tientsin, now Tianjin, in China.
1914 Dr Robert H. Goddard of Worcester, is granted the first patent for a liquid-fuelled rocket design.
1934 Oil pipeline between Iraq and Lebanon is opened.
1948 Six RAF De Havilland Vampire planes fly from Britain to Canada, the first jet aircraft to cross the Atlantic.
1958 Iraq is declared a republic after King Faisal II is killed in a military coup.
1959 The first nuclear warship is launched, the 14,000-tonne cruiser USS Long Beach.
1965 US space probe Mariner 4 flies by Mars, sending back photographs of the Red Planet.
1967 UN adopts a resolution asking Israel to halt action that was aimed at altering the city of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War.
1983 Vladimir Salnikov of the Soviet Union breaks his own world record in the men’s 800 metres freestyle, clocking seven minutes, 52.33 seconds.
1987 Two bomb blasts rip through a shopping area in Karachi, killing at least 72 people.
1997 UN tribunal sentences Bosnian Serb Dusan Tadic to 20 years in prison.
2000 A powerful solar flare, later named the Bastille Day event, causes a geomagnetic storm on Earth.
2002 A test launch of a supersonic jetliner envisaged to replace Concorde ends in disaster after exploding in the South Australian desert.
2003 The USS Ronald Reagan, the first carrier named for a living president, is commissioned.
2006 Allama Hassan Turabi, chief of the main Shiite political party, is killed in a suicide attack in Karachi.
2008 Face scanning system inaugurated at Abu Dhabi International Airport.
2011 Seven kidnapped Estonian cyclists are freed in Lebanon.
2012 American Danny Garcia wins the WBC light welterweight belt after knocking out British Amir Khan in the fourth round in Las Vegas.
2013 17 spectators are crushed to death at a boxing match in eastern Indonesia after supporters of the loser started a riot.
2014 Emirates airline signs a $13 billion OnPoint contract with General Electric for the maintenance, repair and overhaul of its new GE9 engines.
HIGHLIGHT
1980
Billy Carter becomes official Libyan agent
After receiving almost a quarter of a million dollars from Libya, Billy Carter, brother of the President of the United States, is officially a foreign agent for the Libyan Government. By signing a consent order agreeing to register, President Jimmy Carter’s outspoken younger brother resolved a civil suit by the Justice Department and avoided any legal penalties or fines. Billy Carter said, he registered as a foreign agent under protest, saying “I did it to keep from going before a full-fledged grand jury.” “My main crime, 1 think, is to show friendship to a country that is not normally shown friendship in US, and I have not backed down,” he said. While denying any wrong-doing, Billy Carter revealed in the registration statement that he has received 220,000 dollars from Libya as partial payment on a 500,000-dollar loan he said he requested in return for his services during the past two years. In a complaint filed in federal court, the government said Billy Carter “undertook a propaganda campaign” for Libya in this country and acted in a variety of ways “to promote Libyan foreign policy objectives.”
