Reuters North American News Service, January 6th, 2008
Jan 6 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major
events to have occurred on January 13 in history:
1915 - 30,000 people died in a huge earthquake which struck
the central Italian town of Avezzano.
1941 - Irish author James Joyce, whose works included the
masterpiece "Ulysses", died in Zurich, Switzerland.
1963 - Sylvanus Olympio, president of the Republic of Togo,
was killed in an army coup led by Nicolas Grunitzky; Grunitzky
himself was ousted by Etienne Eyedema on the same date in 1967.
1991 - In a crackdown on rebel Lithuania, Soviet troops
backed by tanks stormed the main television station in the
capital Vilnius, killing at least 11 people.
1993 - Former East German leader Erich Honecker, under whom
the Berlin Wall was built, left a Berlin prison to fly to Chile
after a court freed him because he was dying.
2001 - A quake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale shook
Central America, with an epicentre just south of San Salvador.
At least 725 people were killed.
2002 - Gregorio Fuentes, the weather-beaten captain of U.S.
novelist Ernest Hemingway's boat in Cuba and inspiration for
"The Old Man And The Sea," died aged 104.
2003 - Afghanistan acceded to the International Criminal
Court (ICC), opening the way for the extradition and trial of
warlords accused of human rights abuses.
2004 - Britain's most prolific serial killer, Harold
Shipman, convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 of his patients, was
found hanged in his cell.
2005 - Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher, pleaded guilty to a role in a foiled coup in
Equatorial Guinea under a plea bargain that spared him prison.
