Today is Sunday, Feb. 14, the 45th day of 2016. There are 321 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1540 – Holy Roman Emperor Charles V enters Ghent, in Belgium, and executes leaders of revolt.
1663 – Canada becomes royal province of France.
1797 – British fleet under John Jervis and Horatio Nelson defeat Spanish off Cape Saint Vincent.
1846 – Uprising in Cracow Republic spreads swiftly throughout Poland.
1893 – United States annexes Hawaii by treaty.
1899 – U.S. Congress approves, and U.S. President William McKinley signs, legislation authorizing states to use voting machines for federal elections.
1920 – The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago.
1929 – Seven hoodlums, rivals of the Al Capone gang in Chicago, Illinois, are murdered in what becomes known as the “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
1943 – Soviet forces recapture Rostov from Germans in World War II.
1946 – The first all-electronic computer is introduced at the University of Pennsylvania.
1956 – Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounces Joseph Stalin’s policies at Soviet Communist Party conference.
1958 – Union of Kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan into Arab Federation with King Faisal as head of state.
1962 – U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducts a televised tour of the White House.
1972 – U.S. trade restrictions against China are relaxed, putting China on same basis as Soviet Union.
1978 – U.S. government announces plans to sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as to Israel, saying that will maintain military balance in the Middle East.
1979 – Four armed men kidnap U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Adolf Dubs. The ambassador is later killed in a shootout with police.
1988 – Three officers of Yasser Arafat’s mainline group in the Palestine Liberation Organization are killed in Cyprus when their booby-trapped car explodes.
1989 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issues edict sentencing British author Salman Rushdie to death for allegedly insulting Islam, sending him into hiding for years.
1990 – Indian Airlines passenger jet crashes on landing, killing 91 people.
1992 – Nearly half of the former Soviet Republics vow to form separate armies.
1998 – Milan Simic and Miroslav Tadic become the first Bosnian Serb suspects to turn themselves in voluntarily to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
2000 – Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid suspends his powerful security minister, Gen. Wiranto, from the Cabinet over his alleged role in the bloodshed in East Timor during 1999.
2002 – Researchers at the U.S. Texas A&M University in College Station successfully clone a cat, making it the sixth species to be cloned.
2005 – A powerful bomb assassinates former prime minister Rafik Hariri and 13 other people, devastation that harked back to Lebanon’s violent past and raised fears of new bloodshed in the bitter dispute over Syria, the country’s chief power broker.
2009 – The Group of Seven finance ministers pledge to avoid resorting to protectionism as they try to stimulate their own economies in the face of the world’s worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
2011 – The number of monarch butterflies migrating from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico increases this year, a hopeful sign following a worrying 75 percent drop in their numbers last year.
2013 – Oscar Pistorious, the double-amputee Olympic sprinter dubbed the Blade Runner, is charged in the slaying of his girlfriend at his upscale home in South Africa.
2014 — U.N. panel has found that crimes against humanity have been committed in North Korea and will call for an international criminal investigation.
2015 — The Obama administration announces that it will allow Cuba’s small private business sector to sell goods to the United States in a potentially important loosening of the half-century trade embargo on the communist island.
Today’s Birthdays:
Domingo F. Sarmiento, Argentine president 1868-1874 (1811-1888); Israel Zangwill, English author (1846-1926); Jack Benny, U.S. comedian (1894-1975); Gregory Hines, U.S. actor/dancer (1946-2003); Florence Henderson, U.S. actress (1934–); Meg Tilly, U.S. actress (1960–); Rob Thomas, U.S. singer (1972–).
Thought For Today:
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. — R.D. Laing, Scottish psychiatrist (1927-1989).
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