Today is Tuesday, Feb. 9, the 40th day of 2016. There are 326 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1667 – Peace of Andrusovo ends the Thirteen Years’ War between Russia and Poland, giving Russia the eastern Ukraine, including Kiev.
1718 – French colonists arrive in Louisiana.
1788 – Austria’s Joseph II declares war on Turkey.
1801 – Peace of Luneville between Austria and France marks virtual destruction of Holy Roman Empire.
1825 – U.S. House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.
1849 – Rome is proclaimed republic under Giuseppe Mazzini.
1870 – The U.S. Weather Bureau is established.
1891 – Menelek, Emperor of Ethiopia, denounces Italian claims to a protectorate.
1909 – Germany recognizes France’s special interests in Morocco.
1934 – Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey sign the Balkan Pact.
1941 – German troops under Gen. Erwin Rommel cross from Italy to North Africa in World War II.
1943 – World War II battle of Guadalcanal in the southwest Pacific ends with an American victory over Japanese forces.
1962 – Jamaica becomes independent nation within British Commonwealth.
1964 – The Beatles make their first live American television appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
1971 – Earthquake near Los Angeles kills at least 64 people.
1989 – One woman is shot and killed and six people are injured in violence during Jamaican election.
1991 – About 90 percent of those casting ballots in Lithuania’s referendum on independence vote in favor of secession from the Soviet Union.
1995 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin says that Russian troops have pacified Chechnya. In reality, fighting continues and the Russians are later forced to withdraw from the separatist region.
1996 – A bomb explodes in a London business district, killing two people, injuring 37 and causing an estimated $125 million in damage. The outlawed Irish Republican Army claims responsibility.
1998 – The United States announces it will send 2,500 to 3,000 Marines to Kuwait, bolstering forces in the latest standoff with Iraq over weapons inspections.
2002 – Hundreds of singing Ethiopians line Addis Ababa’s streets to welcome the return of a replica of the Ark of the Covenant looted from Ethiopia by British soldiers along with gold and silver artifacts more than 130 years ago
2003 – Iranian President Mohammed Khatami announces Iran has mined uranium for use in its power plants. He says Iran would retain control of the entire cycle of use of the uranium it mined.
2006 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls U.S. President George W. Bush a “madman” and accuses the United States and Britain of planning to invade Iran, Venezuela’s closest ally in the Middle East.
2007 – The U.N. atomic monitoring agency suspends nearly half the technical aid it provides to Iran, a symbolically significant punishment for nuclear defiance that only North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had faced in the past.
2008 – Turkey’s parliament votes to amend the constitution to lift a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at universities, despite fierce opposition from the secular establishment.
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.
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.
2015 — Malaysia’s top court upholds opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy conviction and sentences him to five years in prison, a verdict he slams as the “murder of judicial independence” and the result of a political conspiracy.
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, U.S. singer/songwriter (1942–); Alice Walker, U.S. author (1944–); Mia Farrow, U.S. actress (1945–); Ziyi Zhang, Chinese actress (1979–).
Thought For Today:
If we knew where opinion ended and fact began, we should have discovered, I suppose, the absolute — Alec Waugh, English author (1898-1981).
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
