Today in history, October 26: Uluru hand over

The Mutijuli Aboriginal Community was granted freehold title to Ayers Rock and the Uluru National Park in the Northern Territory, on this day in 1985.

Highlights in history on this date:

1878: Australian bushranger Ned Kelly shoots and kills three police officers at Stringybark Creek, Victoria.

1917: Brazil declares war on Germany in World War I.

1942: US aircraft carrier Hornet is sunk after being hit by Japanese aircraft in Solomon Islands battle.

1955: Republic of South Vietnam is proclaimed under Ngo Dinh Diem; Parliament enacts a law on the permanent neutrality of Austria, which forms the basis for unprecedented peace and prosperity.

1962: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offers to withdraw missiles from Cuba if United States removes bases in Turkey, but is rebuffed.

1964: Eric Cooke, the “Moonstruck Murderer,” is hanged in Perth for multiple killings.

Murderer Eric Edgar Cooke, who was hanged on this day in 1964.

1985: The Mutijuli Aboriginal Community is granted freehold title to Ayers Rock and the Uluru National Park in the Northern Territory.

1989: Nigel Lawson resigns suddenly as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.

1994: Israel and Jordan sign a treaty, ending 46 years of hostility.

1995: Russian President Boris Yeltsin is hospitalised in Moscow with an apparent heart attack, his second in four months.

1996: Half a million Hutu refugees from Rwanda are left to fend for themselves after the United Nations evacuates aid workers from the camp in Bukavu.

1998: Days after signing a peace accord with the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beats a no-confidence vote in Parliament.

1999: Britain’s House of Lords votes to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament.

2000: Supporters of Ivory Coast’s president-elect and his political rival fight bloody clashes in Abidjan over a demand for new presidential elections.

2001: Abdul Haq, veteran Afghan opposition commander, is captured and executed by Taliban troops while on a mission inside Afghanistan to gather support for a peace plan.

Afghan opposition figure Abdul Haq.

2002: Almost 130 of a total 750 hostages and about 40 guerillas are killed when Russian special forces storm a Moscow theatre at dawn to end a three-day siege by Chechen rebels.

2004: The Israeli parliament approves Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the occupied Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in 2005.

2005: Veteran Australian TV presenter Bert Newton announces he’s quitting Network Ten after it axes his long-running show Good Morning Australia.

2006: Women in India are for the first time given protection from abuse endured in their own homes, and a right to compensation.

2007: Nine French citizens who are a part of L’Arche de Zoe are arrested in Chad after the group tried to fly more than 100 African children to France, saying it wanted to save them from the crisis in neighbouring Darfur.

2008: US military helicopters launch a rare attack on Syrian territory, killing eight people in a strike the government in Damascus condemned as “serious aggression.”

2009: One of Fidel Castro’s sisters says in a memoir that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

2010: Scores of people are killed when a tsunami and a volcanic eruption are sparked by spasms from the Pacific “Ring of Fire” deep within the earth.

A rescue worker searches for victims in the debris of “Ring of Fire” volanic eruption.

2011: Two policemen who beat a man to death are convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and get a relatively light sentence in a case that helped spark Egypt’s uprising, but the verdict disappoints pro-democracy activists.

2012: Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to four years in prison in a verdict that could see him barred from public office for four years.

2013: Days of torrential rain, floods in southeast India kill dozens of people and force the evacuation of more than 70,000 others from hundreds of low-lying villages.

2015: A 7.5-magnitude quake hits Afghanistan and its surrounding countries, killing 364 people, most of them in Pakistan.

2016: Australia’s most senior Catholic Cardinal George Pell is interviewed in Rome over allegations of sexual assault dating back to the 1970s, police confirm.

2017: The family of an indigenous boy assaulted in Alice Springs say they believe it was racially motivated and are worried about safety on the town’s streets.

2018: A plane carrying Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex Meghan had to abort landing at Sydney airport after another aircraft blocked the runway following a visit to Fiji and Tonga.

Happy Birthday, Guy Sebastian!

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:

Francois Mitterrand, President of France (1916-1996); Hillary Rodham Clinton, US presidential candidate (1947); Rose Porteous, Filipino one-time wife of West Australian mining millionaire Lang Hancock (1948); Natalie Merchant, US singer (1963); Keith Urban, New Zealand-born country singer (1967); Seth MacFarlane, US actor, writer and comedian (1973); Chloe Hooper, Australian author (1973); Guy Sebastian, Australian Idol winner (1981).

THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

“Each child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man” — Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Nobel prize-winning poet (1861-1941).