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Monday, January 31
31/01/2005 07:20 - (SA)
Today is Monday, January 31, the 31st day of 2005. There are 334 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
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 1.
1928 - Leon Trotsky is expelled from Soviet Union.
1943 - German troops surrender at Stalingrad in World War 2.
1944 - US forces invade Kwajalein Atoll and other parts of the Japanese-held Marshall Islands during World War 2.
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.
1950 - US President Harry Truman announces he ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb.
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.
1967 - Britain tightens sanctions on Rhodesia.
1971 - Astronauts Alan B Shepard Jr, Edgar D Mitchell and Stuart A Roosa blast off aboard Apollo 14 on 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 world's "main hotbed of war."
1984 - Nine of the world's poorer nations open talks in Lusaka, Zambia, on a joint strategy to break traditional trade links with South Africa and to combat two years of devastating drought.
1988 - Greek and Turkish premiers agree on "No War" policy, following confrontation over disputed waters in Aegean Sea in March 1987.
1988 - The SA Defence Force claims that MPLA forces in Angola used chemical weapons against Unita forces.
1990 - McDonald's restaurant opens in Moscow.
1990 - President FW de Klerk appoints a one-man commission of inquiry into alleged hit-squads and a second commission into the circumstances surrounding the death in detention of 20-year-old Clayton Sizwe Sithole.
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 HW Bush asks the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Libya.
1993 - The United States begins reassembling a Somali national police force to patrol Mogadishu's lawless streets.
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 multibillion 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 $500m.
1998 - Nine are killed when Indian troops fire on protesters in Kashmir.
1999 - The deadline to complete the US-brokered Wye River accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority passes, with the two sides blaming each other for the lack of Israeli troop withdrawals.
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-year-old murals, added to Unesco's World Heritage list.
2001 - A Scottish court convened in the Netherlands convicts a Libyan intelligence officer of murder and sentences him to life imprisonment for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. A second Libyan is acquitted.
2002 - The Philippines and the United States begin a joint training exercise where the United States will assist Filipino troops fighting a Muslim rebel group, Abu Sayyaf; the 31st World Economic Forum begins in New York City with a heavy police deployment to counter protests by anti-globilisation demonstrators.
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.
2004 - Hundreds of Japanese troops get a ceremonial send-off before leaving for Iraq on a humanitarian mission that will be the largest deployment by Japan's military since World War 2. In deference to the war-renouncing provisions of the nation's 1947 constitution, their duties will be limited to repairing war-damaged buildings and providing medical care.
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--)
Oe Kenzaburo, Japanese writer and Nobel laureate (1935--)
Suzanne Pleshette, US actress (1937--)
Anthony LaPaglia, Australian actor (1959--).
Thought For Today:
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is disappearing - RD Laing, Scottish psychiatrist (1927-1989).
- SAPA
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