Events in History
Event of Interest
Aug 11 Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian National Authority president, Yasser Arafat, arrives in Cape Town on his first state visit to South Africa at the invitation of President Nelson Mandela
Event of Interest
Aug 14 Winnie Mandela sued by the South African government
Omagh Bombing
Aug 15 Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland, the worst terrorist incident of The Troubles, kills 29 people and injures about 220
'I Did Not Have Sexual Relations With That Woman'
Aug 17 Monica Lewinsky scandal: US President Bill Clinton admits in taped testimony he had an "improper physical relationship" with the intern and on the same day admits before the nation he "misled people" about the relationship
Assassination
Aug 19 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission chairperson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, releases documents revealing an alleged plot by Western countries to assassinate UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden
- Aug 20 The Supreme Court of Canada rules that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.
- Aug 20 U.S. embassy bombings: US military launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
Event of Interest
Aug 21 P. W. Botha found guilty of contempt for repeatedly ignoring subpoenas to testify before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- Aug 24 First RFID human implantation tested in the United Kingdom.
- Aug 24 The Netherlands is selected as the site for the trial of the two Libyan suspects of the 1988 Pan Am bombing.
- Aug 28 Pakistan's National Assembly passes a constitutional amendment to make the "Qur'an and Sunnah" the "supreme law" but the bill is defeated in the Senate.
- Aug 31 North Korea reportedly launches Kwangmyongsong, its first satellite.
Weddings in History
- Aug 22 FOX News Channel correspondent and Robert F Kennedy's youngest son Douglas Kennedy (32) weds Molly Stark (29) in Nantucket, Massachusetts
Deaths in History
- Aug 4 Yuri Artyukhin, Russian cosmonaut (b. 1930)
- Aug 5 Otto Kretschmer, German U-boat commander, dies at 86
- Aug 5 Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria communist leader of the People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB), 1954-89, dies at 86
- Aug 6 André Weil, French mathematician (foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry), dies at 92
- Aug 8 Mahmoud Saremi, Iranian journalist
- Aug 13 Julien Green, American-French writer (Frere Francois), dies at 97
- Aug 13 Philip von Schantz, Swedish painter, dies at 70
- Aug 16 Dorothy West, American writer of the Haarlem Renaissance (The Living is Easy), dies at 91
- Aug 19 Vasily Arkhipov, Soviet-Russian naval officer who saved the world by refusing to launch a nuclear torpedo from submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, dies of kidney cancer at 72
- Aug 25 Lewis F. Powell Jr., American Supreme Court justice (1972-87), dies at 90
- Aug 26 Frederick Reines, American physicist, (1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for co-discovering the Neutrino), dies at 80
Authors
Civil Rights Activists
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