Today’s Highlight

1950: US President Harry Truman announces he ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Other Events

1531: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V appoints his sister, Mary of Hungary, as Regent of the Netherlands.

1606: Guy Fawkes, convicted for his part in the "Gunpowder Plot" against the English Parliament and King James I, is executed.

1709: British sailor Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, is rescued after being marooned on a Pacific island for four years.

1865: The House of Representatives passes a US constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

1884: Russians take Merv from Amir of Afghanistan.

1891: Civil war begins in Chile.

1917: Germany announces policy of unrestricted naval warfare in World War I.

1943: German troops surrender at Stalingrad in World War II.

1944: US forces invade Kwajalein Atoll and other parts of the Japaneseheld Marshall Islands during World War II.

1945: Private Eddie Slovik becomes the only US soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion.

1949: The first US TV daytime soap opera, These Are My Children, is broadcast from the NBC station in Chicago. 1957: Trans-Iranian pipeline, from Abadan to Tehran, is completed.

1958: First US earth satellite, Explorer I, is launched at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

1962: Foreign ministers of Organisation of American States vote to exclude Cuba from participating in the Inter-American system. 1966: Soviets launch Luna 9, which makes the first successful soft landing on the moon.

1971: Astronauts Alan B Shepard Jr, Edgar D Mitchell and Stuart A Roosa blast off aboard Apollo 14on a mission to the moon.

1979: China's First Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping says after meetings with US President Jimmy Carter and congressional leaders that Moscow is the world's “main hotbed of war”.

1988: Greek and Turkish premiers agree on "No War" policy, following confrontation over disputed waters in Aegean Sea in March 1987.

1990: McDonald's restaurant opens in Moscow.

1991: Allied forces claim victory in battle of Khafji, first major ground battle of Persian Gulf War; Croatia walks out of regional talks on political future of Yugoslavia.

1992: US President George H W Bush asks the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Libya.

1994: In Mogadishu, US Marines in a convoy carrying American diplomats open fire near a crowded food distribution centre. At least five Somalis are killed and many wounded.

1995: The Mexican peso strengthens when US President Bill Clinton announces a multi-billion-dollar credit package aimed at helping Mexico out of its financial crisis.

1996: In one of the worst attacks in Sri Lanka's 12-year civil war, Tamil separatist rebels ram a truck packed with explosives into the central bank, killing 88 people and injuring more than 1,400.

1997: Mexican drug kingpin Juan Garcia Abrego is sentenced to 11 concurrent life prison terms and fines that total nearly $500 million.

2000: Japan promises 6 million yen (US$57,000) to North Korea to help preserve ancient tombs near the Stalinist nation's capital. North Korea hopes to have the tombs of Goguryo, which contain 1,500-yearold murals, added to UNESCO's World Heritage list.

2001: A Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands convicted one Libyan, acquitted a second, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was given a life sentence, but was released after eight years on compassionate grounds by Scotland's government.

2002: The Philippines and the United States begin a joint training exercise where the United States will assists Filipino troops fighting a Muslim rebel group, Abu Sayyaf.

2003: Six men are convicted in Mozambique of the November 2000 killing of investigative reporter Carlos Cardoso. The journalist was gunned down in a Maputo suburb while probing the disappearance of US$14 million in privatisation funds from the Commercial Bank of Mozambique.

2005: Police burst into suspected terrorist hideouts throughout a tranquil suburb of Kuwait City, arresting a reputed terror boss and setting off a ferocious gunbattle that killed at least four of his followers and a bystander in Kuwait's worst-ever fight with militants.

2007: Counter-terrorism police in Birmingham, England, arrest nine men and foil an alleged kidnapping scheme that involved torturing and beheading a British Muslim soldier and broadcasting the execution on the Internet.

2008: An explosion at an unlicenced fireworks factory in Istanbul kills 17 people and injures 68 others.

2009: An oil spill from a crashed truck erupts into flames in Molo, Kenya, killing at least 115 people.

2010: The world's foremost gathering of business and government leaders wrap up a five-day meeting in Davos, Switzerland with widespread agreement that a fragile recovery is under way, but no consensus on what is going to spur job growth and prevent another global economic meltdown.

2011: A foreign intelligence report says the control systems of Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant have been penetrated by a computer worm unleashed last year and warns of a possible Chernobyl-like disaster once the site becomes fully operational.

Today's Birthdays

Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese shogun (1543-1616); Franz Schubert, German composer (1797-1828); Anna Pavlova, Russian ballerina (1885-1931); Norman Mailer, US writer (1923-2007); Suzanne Pleshette, US actress (1937-2008); Oe Kenzaburo, Japanese writer and Nobel laureate (1935-); Justin Timberlake, US singer (1981-); Philip Glass, composer (1937-); Carol Channing, actress (1921-); Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (1938-)

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