Under Sunday, February 19, the book of history records, among other things:
1618: The war between Austria and the Republic of Venice ends with the Peace of Madrid.
1803: France’s ruler General Napoleon Bonaparte signs the mediation act which, after the failure of the Helvetic Republic, turns Switzerland back into a confederation of 19 effectively sovereign cantons.
1803: US President Thomas Jefferson recognizes the eastern part of the Northwest Territory that remained after the secession from Indiana under the name of Ohio as the 17th member state of the USA, without formal admission by congressional resolution. (This is made up for in 1953 and Ohio is officially admitted to the Union retroactively to March 1, 1803.)
1848: The American Nathan Winslow in Portland (Maine) sells canned sweet corn for the first time.
1868: Uruguay’s President Venancio Flores is assassinated while the South American country is caught up in the triple alliance war (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay against Paraguay). An uprising that accompanies it fails, however, and the leaders are summarily shot on the same day.
1868: In Vienna, the Bavarian Prince Ludwig (as Ludwig III, the last king of Bavaria) marries Archduchess Marie Therese of Austria-Este, Princess of Modena.
1878: Thomas Alva Edison receives a patent for the phonograph he developed, a forerunner of the gramophone.
1908: The Great Al-Haram Mosque in Medina, where the tomb of the Prophet Mohammed is located, will receive electric lighting.
1913: Militant British women’s rights activists blow up the country house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister David Lloyd George with a bomb.
1928: On the last day of the Olympic Ice Hockey Tournament in St. Moritz, Canada outclassed Switzerland 13-0, becoming World Champion and Olympic Champion. Sweden finished second at the Olympics and became European champions with a 3-1 win over Great Britain. In the evening, the Second Olympic Winter Games will end with the closing ceremony.
1933: After fleeing Germany, the writer Heinrich Mann meets his brother Thomas in Paris.
1948: In the Nuremberg Trials, the German Field Marshal Wilhelm List and General Walter Kuntze were sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Military Tribunal for war crimes in the Balkans. General Lothar Rendulic, originally from Austria, was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.
1948: The Belgian Parliament decides to introduce women’s suffrage, which previously only existed at municipal level.
1968: An international arbitral tribunal divided the Rann von Katsch between India (90 percent) and Pakistan (10 percent).
1978: An Egyptian commando unit trying to storm a plane hijacked by Arab terrorists in Nicosia loses 15 men in fighting with the Cypriot National Guard.
1998: Five agents of the Israeli secret service Mossad are caught in an attempted wiretapping operation in Bern. The incident puts a serious strain on relations between Switzerland and Israel.
1998: At the figure skating competition of the XVIII. 15-year-old American Tara Lipinski wins the gold medal at the Nagano Winter Olympics in Japan.
2008: Cuban head of state Fidel Castro, who has been in power since 1959, hands over his office and supreme command of the armed forces to his brother Raúl Castro.
2013: A lesbian couple living in Austria wins a dispute over the adoption of a boy before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). For the Strasbourg judges, the lack of possibility of stepchild adoption for same-sex couples represents discrimination. The National Council complies with the judgment in July and opens stepchild adoption for homosexuals.
birthdays: Nicholas Copernicus, astronomer (1473-1543); Luigi Boccherini, Italian composer (1743-1805); Nicolas Hayek, Switzerland. Entrepreneur (1928-2010); Pim Fortuyn, Dutch politician (1948-2002); Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, argent. Politician; President 2007-2015 (1953); Seal, British pop singer (1963).
days of death: Edmund Landau, German mathematician (1877-1938); Otto Basil (actually O. Adam Franz Bazil), Austrian writer (1901-1983); André Cournand, French-US-Amer. medics; Nobel Prize 1956 (1895-1988); Robert Richardson, US physicist; Nobel Prize 1996 (1937-2013); Peter Pikl, Austria Actor and director (1946-2018).
name days: Irmgard, Konrad, Julian, Hadwig, Bonifatius, Arnold, Gabinus, Friedrich, Susanne, Hedwig.