Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 18:
1928 – The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was lost in flight over the Arctic Ocean.
1953 – Egypt was proclaimed a republic with General Neguib as its first president.
1983 – Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space, aboard the shuttle Challenger.
1997 – Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan resigned, bringing to a close a tempestuous one-year tenure as the modern republic’s first Islamist leader.
1999 – The Group of Seven leading industrial countries agreed at a summit in Cologne on an initiative to forgive $70 billion in debts owed by poor countries.
2002 – In Israel, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus during morning rush hour, killing 19 people and wounding more than 50.
2003 – Finnish Prime Minister Anneli Jaatteenmaki resigned after using leaked secret state information on Iraq during the March 2003 parliamentary election.
2003 – Italian parliament votes on law to give Premier Silvio Berlusconi immunity from prosecution while he remains in office.
2006 – The U.S. Episcopal Church chose Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its first woman leader, a move unprecedented in the Anglican church.
2010 – Portuguese Nobel literature laureate Jose Saramago died.
2011 – World’s first transatlantic flight using biofuel.
