This Day in History – February 9
Today is the 40th day of 2015. There are 325 days left in the year.
TODAYS’ HIGHLIGHT
1962: Jamaica becomes independent nation within British Commonwealth.
OTHER EVENTS
1825: US House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.
1934: Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey sign the Balkan Pact.
1964: The Beatles make their first live American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
1989: One woman is shot and killed and six people are injured in violence during Jamaican election.
1994: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister, reach agreement on security issues that have stalled the Israeli PLO peace accord.
2006: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls US President George W Bush a “mad man” and accuses the United States and Britain of planning to invade Iran, Venezuela’s closest ally in the Middle East.
2008: Turkey’s parliament votes to amend the constitution to lift a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at Turkey’s universities, despite fierce opposition from the secular establishment.
2011: British police disclose they will contact thousands of people whose cellphones may have been targeted by the News of The World tabloid, an indication of the scale of the scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
2012: The United States and its allies believe the window to stop Iran from building a bomb is quickly closing, pushing conflict with the Islamic republic to the top of the Obama administration’s national security worries in the midst of an election year.
2013: Yemen’s interior minister says his country was disappointed to find that a large and diverse cache of weapons seized on a ship last month had been exported from Iran, a finding Washington said underscores Tehran’s continuing evasion of UN resolutions.
2014: Hundreds of civilians are evacuated from the besieged Syrian city of Homs, braving gunmen spraying bullets and lobbing mortar shells to flee as part of a rare three-day truce to relieve a chocking blockade.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Leander Starr Jameson, South African statesman (1853-1917); Mrs Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Tanner), English actress (1865-1940); Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, Australian aviation pioneer (1897-1935); Carole King, US singer/songwriter (1942- ); Alice Walker, US author (1944- ); Mia Farrow, US actress (1945- ); Ziyi Zhang, Chinese actress (1979- )
— AP
