On August 5
On August 5, the Human Saga records one pivotal event: Founding of the South Pacific Forum (Pacific Islands Forum) (1971).
On this day
The South Pacific Forum, later renamed the Pacific Islands Forum, was established at an inaugural meeting held in Wellington, New Zealand, from 5 to 7 August 1971.
Also this week in history (Aug 2 – Aug 8)
In August 1444 a fleet of six ships organised by the Lagos tax-collector Lançarote de Freitas returned from raids on the Bay of Arguin (modern Mauritania) and landed roughly 235 captive Africans at Lagos in southern Portugal.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857—known variously as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, or India's First War of Independence—erupted on 10 May 1857 when sepoys of the East India Company's Bengal Army mutinied at Meerut, in part over the…
During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who had invaded Italy by crossing the Alps, inflicted on Rome one of the worst defeats in its history near the village of Cannae in Apulia.
On 6 August 1806, Francis II abdicated the imperial crown and released all member states and officials from their obligations, formally dissolving the Holy Roman Empire after roughly a thousand years.
On 7 August 1819 Simón Bolívar's patriot army, having crossed the flooded plains of the Orinoco and the freezing Andean pass of the Páramo de Pisba, routed a Spanish royalist force at the Boyacá bridge in present-day Colombia.
On 6 August 1985, eight member states of the South Pacific Forum signed the Treaty of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, creating the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone.
Receiving royal assent on 2 August 1935, the Government of India Act 1935 was the most extensive constitutional reform enacted by Britain for India before independence.
The 2008 Summer Olympics opened on 8 August 2008 at Beijing's National Stadium, the 'Bird's Nest', with an elaborate ceremony directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou and watched by an estimated audience of several billion worldwide.
On 8 August 2025, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met at a White House summit mediated by President Donald Trump, where they initialed a peace agreement and signed a joint declaration aimed at…