Thursday, March 3
2005-03-03 07:30
Today is Thursday, March 3, the 63rd day of 2005. There are 302 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1707 - Mogul Emperor Aurangjeb dies in India and is succeeded by Bahadur.
1813 - Britain signs Treaty of Stockholm with Sweden, which agrees to supply army in return for British subsidies and a promise not to oppose union with Norway.
1861 - Emancipation of Russian serfs is proclaimed.
1875 - The Georges Bizet opera Carmen premieres in Paris.
1878 - Bulgaria is liberated from five centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.
1887 - Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrives at the Alabama home of Capt and Mrs Arthur H. Keller to become the teacher of Helen, their blind and deaf 6-year-old daughter. She succeeds in teaching Helen to read and write.
1896 - Peace of Bucharest between Serbia and Bulgaria is signed.
1918 - Russian Bolsheviks sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, surrendering a quarter of the country to Germany while receiving crucial support in return.
1931 - The United States officially adopts the Star-Spangled Banner" as the country's national anthem.
1932 - Chinese forces are driven back from Shanghai by Japanese.
1941 - Bulgaria signs the Tripartite Pact and allows German troops to cross its territory. Although Bulgaria becomes an ally of Nazi Germany, Bulgarians oppose deportation of Jews and save them from Nazi death camps.
1944 - US fighter planes make first appearance over Berlin in World War 2.
1974 - Turkish Airlines DC-10 crashes shortly after takeoff from Orly Airport in Paris, killing nearly 350 people.
1976 - US government under President Gerald Ford discloses that it has decided to sell weapons to Egypt.
1986 - Protestant militants go on car-burning rampage in central Belfast, Northern Ireland, in protest against Anglo-Irish accord.
1988 - Political clashes leave 11 people dead and more than 300 injured in Bangladesh as accusations of vote fraud mar parliamentary elections.
1991 - Civil unrest spreads in cities in southern Iraq after the Gulf War leaves the Iraqi military in shambles; in a case that sparked a national outcry, motorist Rodney King is severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in a scene captured on amateur video.
1992 - Police say they recover the bodies of 120 Azerbaijanis killed as they fled an Armenian assault in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.
1993 - An American soldier is killed by a land mine in Somalia and a second dies in a truck crash, bringing to six the number of Americans killed in Operation Restore Hope.
1994 - US President Bill Clinton signs an executive order that takes steps toward retaliatory tariffs against Japanese imports.
1995 - The former president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, goes on a hunger strike to force the government to take back what he describes as slander against him. He suspends the strike a few hours later.
1996 - A bomb explodes aboard a bus in the heart of Jerusalem, killing 19 people, including the bomber.
1997 - A passenger train derails in Pakistan's Punjab province, killing at least 125 people and injuring more than 450.
1998 - A nationwide strike shuts down most of Zimbabwe's economy and the government threatens to punish those who encouraged the protest.
1999 - An estimated 74 million US viewers watch former White House intern Monica Lewinsky confess the details of her affair with US President Bill Clinton.
2000 - Former dictator General Augusto Pinochet returns to Chile a free man, 16 months after he was detained in Britain on torture charges.
2001 - Norwegian Borge Ousland covers only about 2.9km on skis, starting from a Russian island in the frozen Arctic Ocean, on the first day of his gruelling trek to reach Canada from Siberia over the North Pole.
2002 - In a break with the country's long-standing tradition of isolationism and neutrality in world affairs, Swiss citizens vote in favour of becoming the 190th member of the United Nations.
2003 - US officials announce the arrests of three members of Rwanda's ethnic Hutu rebel movement for the 1999 murders of two American tourists in Uganda.
2004 - Angered by way President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced to flee his country, the 15-nation Caribbean Community says it will not provide troops for the UN peacekeeping force to Haiti. Aristide claimed that he was abducted at gunpoint by US Marines and sent into exile in South Africa.
Today's Birthdays:
Thomas Otway, English dramatist (1652-1685)
Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-American inventor of telephone (1847-1922)
Jean Harlow, US actress (1911-1937)
Jennifer Warnes, US singer (1947--)
Miranda Richardson, British actress (1958--)
Tone-Loc, US rapper/actor (1966--)
Jessica Biel, US actress (1982--).
Thought For Today:
America is a tune. It must be sung together - Gerald Stanley Lee, American clergyman and author (1862-1944).
- SAPA