Today's Highlight

1962: Trinidad and Tobago becomes an independent nation within the British Commonwealth.

Other Notable Events

1888: Mary Ann Nicholls is found murdered in London's East End. She is the first victim of Jack the Ripper.

1957: Malaysia gains independence as Federation of Malaya.

1971: Cuba terminates the airlift that had brought 246,000 Cuban refugees from Havana to Florida since December 1965.

1977: Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith's party wins the election and gains all 50 white seats in Parliament. The vote gives Smith a mandate to negotiate with black leaders on greater political representation for the country's six million blacks.

1980: Polish labour leaders sign agreements with Communist government establishing for the first time in a Soviet-bloc nation the rights to strike and to establish free trade unions.

1987: Government and opposition officials in South Korea agree on revising constitution to clear way for direct presidential elections and other reforms.

1990: After Armenian Republic's Parliament declares a state of emergency, 250 militant nationalists give up their weapons.

1991: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan become the ninth and tenth Soviet republics to declare independence.

1994: Irish Republican Army declares an open-ended ceasefire in its 24-year campaign against British rule of Northern Ireland.

1996: Iraq captures Irbil in northern Iraq, a key city inside the Kurdish "safe haven"protected by US-led forces. It is Saddam Hussein's largest military action since the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

1997: Typhoon Rex veers away from Japan's main island of Honshu, but the record rainfall it spawned forces thousands to flee their homes. Flooding and landslides caused by the rains kill 14 people and injure 45.

2004: Militants in Iraq kill 12 Nepalese contract workers, in a gruesome video discovered on an Islamic Web site, showing one of them beheaded and the 11 others shot in a methodical series of execution-style slayings.

2005: Panicked by rumours of a suicide bomber, thousands of Shiite pilgrims break into a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad during a religious procession, crushing one another or plunging into the Tigris river. Nearly 1,000 die, mostly women and children.

2006: Police in Norway recover the Edvard Munch masterpieces The Scream and Madonna, two years after masked gunmen grabbed the national art treasures in front of stunned visitors at an Oslo museum.

2007: The 25th Anniversary of "Elk Cloner", regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide.

2008: Practitioners of the ancient Greek religion gather among the ruined temples at the Acropolis, praying to Athena to stop the removal of sculptures and pieces of the temples to museums. Participants claim it is the first such gathering since the religion was abolished late in the 4th century.

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