Today is Saturday, Feb. 6, the 37th day of 2016. There are 329 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1643 – Dutch mariner Abel Tasman discovers Fiji Islands in the Pacific.
1701 – War of Spanish Succession begins.
1715 – Peace of Utrecht ends war between Spain and Portugal.
1778 – Britain declares war on France.
1819 – British East India Company, represented by Stamford Raffles, establishes settlement at Singapore.
1840 – Treaty of Waitangi is signed, guaranteeing Maori tribal chiefs their lands and certain other rights in return for British sovereignty over New Zealand.
1869 – Greece agrees to leave Crete following Turkish ultimatum.
1897 – Crete proclaims union with Greece.
1899 – Treaty of Paris is ratified, whereby Spain cedes Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.
1902 – French agreement with Ethiopia to finance railway construction provokes protests from Britain and Italy.
1952 – Britain’s King George VI dies and is succeeded by his daughter, Elizabeth II.
1959 – The United States successfully test- fires a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile.
1964 – England and France agree on constructing English Channel rail tunnel.
1971 – U.S. Apollo 14 astronauts prepare to head back to earth after spending 33 hours on the moon.
1975 – Three paintings — one by Raphael and two by Piero della Francesca — are stolen from National Gallery in Urbino, Italy.
1990 – West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl says he favors immediate talks with East Germany on introducing the Deutsche mark there.
1991 – Colombian President Cesar Gaviria pleads for peace after a two-day rebel offensive that leaves at least 47 people dead.
1993 – Armenian forces capture 12 settlements in a major offensive in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan.
1994 – Martti Ahtisaari wins Finland’s first direct presidential election.
1995 – Two 100-ton spaceships — the biggest ever to converge in space — fly in formation in the first U.S.-Russian rendezvous in 20 years.
1996 – More than 1,000 Palestinians challenge Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem by filing claims for property they once owned in the Jewish part of the disputed city.
1999 – The first peace talks between Kosovo Albanians and Yugoslavia open in Rambouillet, France.
2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her candidacy for U.S. Senate in New York. She later defeats the Republican candidate in November, becoming the only U.S. first lady ever elected to public office.
2001 – Ariel Sharon is elected Israeli prime minister in a landslide win over Ehud Barak.
2005 – The African Union says the military in Togo has conducted a virtual coup by ignoring the constitution and appointing the son of Africa’s longest ruling leader, Gnassingbe Eyadema, to take over as the country’s new leader just hours after his father died of a heart attack.
2009 – Nigerian health workers hunt down errant bottles of a poisonous teething formula as 84 infants and children have died after swallowing a syrup laced with a chemical normally found in antifreeze.
2013 – An Islamic summit that opens in Egypt lays bar the multiple divisions within the Muslim and Arab worlds with conflicting approaches to Syria’s civil war exposing Sunni-Shiite fault lines that have torn the region for years.
2014 — A suicide bomber blows himself up at the gates of a Syrian prison and rebels storm in behind him, freeing hundreds of inmates as part of an offensive aimed at capturing key government symbols around the northern city of Aleppo.
2015— A prosecutor whose mysterious death has rocked Argentina’s government confided to an opposition congresswoman that he believed his case against President Cristina Fernandez was going to cost him his position, the lawmaker says
Today’s Birthdays:
Christopher Marlowe, English poet-dramatist (1564-1593); Queen Anne of England (1665-1714); Anton Hermann Fokker, Dutch aviation pioneer (1890-1939); Babe Ruth, U.S. baseball star (1895-1948); Ronald Reagan, U.S. president (1911-2004); Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hungarian actress (1917–); Francois Truffaut, French film director (1932-1984); Bob Marley, Jamaican musician (1945-1981); Natalie Cole, U.S. singer (1950–2015); Rick Astley, British singer (1966–);
Thought For Today:
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered — Stanley Kubrick, American movie director (1928-1999)
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
