Assassination attempt on Bakhtiar fails
1980 - Gunmen posing as journalists tried to assassinate former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar, killing a police guard and a woman neighbour. Police said the three raiders bluffed their way past police to reach the second-floor landing of the apartment block and pumped automatic-pistol fire into Bakhtiar’s flat before an armoured door was slammed shut. Bakhtiar, the deposed Shah’s last prime minister, was accused earlier in the week of being linked with a coup attempt in Iran. The exiled politician said, he had been receiving death threats almost daily. Asked whether he feared death squads might strike again, Bakhtiar, 63, said: “With irresponsible people heading a government, gangsters are trained and sent pretty well everywhere.”
July 18
1872 - Britain introduces voting by secret ballot.
1877 - American inventor Thomas Edison invents the carbon telephone transmitter.
1923 - British Matrimonial Causes Act gives women equality in divorce suits.
1934 - British king George V opens the Mersey Tunnel, the longest underwater tunnel at the time.
1972 - Cairo orders Soviet Union to withdraw military advisers stationed in Egypt.
1980 - India launches its first satellite, Rohini.
1988 - Iran announces it has accepted a Security Council ceasefire call in its eight- year-old war with Iraq.
1993 - Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resigns and dissolves parliament.
1996 - A TWA jumbo jet explodes over the Atlantic shortly after takeoff, killing 228 people aboard.
1998 - South African President Nelson Mandela celebrates his 80th birthday by marrying Graca Machel.
2000 - Alex Salmond resigns as leader of Scottish National Party.
2002 - Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is elected as Indian President.
2003 - Dubai Government issues a decree, setting up the Dubai Media Foundation.
2005 - The first successful robot camel jockey race in the world is introduced in the UAE.
2008 - Qatar becomes the biggest investor in Barclays.
2010 - An express train ploughs through a stationary train at a station in West Bengal, India, killing 61 people.
2012 - Bollywood superstar Rajesh Khanna dies at the age of 69 in his home in Mumbai.
2013 - Detroit files the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States’ history.
