Today in History
January 11
1805 Michigan Territory is created by an act of the United States Congress.
1866 Steamship ‘London’ is wrecked en route to Australia, 231 people die.
1935 Aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.
1943 Britain and United States relinquish extraterritorial rights in China.
1960 Chad declares independence from France
1962 Avalanche buries village in the Peruvian Andes, 3,000 people are reported killed
1964 Panama ends diplomatic relations with US.
1966 Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri dies.
1972 East Pakistan renames itself Bangladesh.
1975 The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 17 carrying the first two cosmonauts to visit the space station Salyut 4.
1976 President Rodriguez Lara of Ecuador is ousted in a coup.
1977 France sets off an international uproar by releasing Abu Daoud, a Palestinian suspected of involvement in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
1982 Honduras adopts constitution
1986 The Gateway Bridge, Brisbane in Queensland, Australia is officially opened.
1998 An armed gang attacks two villages outside Algiers, Algeria, slaughtering 120 people.
1992 Algerian President Chadli Benjedid resigns.
1994 The Irish Government lifts the 15-year broadcasting ban on the IRA and Sinn Fein.
1995 An Intercontinental Aviation DC-9 with at least 52 people aboard crashes near Cartagena, Colombia, with only one survivor.
1996 Ryutaro Hashimoto becomes prime minister of Japan.
1999 Haiti’s President Rene Preval dissolves Parliament after a 22-month impasse with no working government.
2002 China signs agreements to boost economic ties with Bangladesh.
2007 Vietnam becomes the 150th member of the World Trade Organisation.
2008 Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to scale Mt Everest, dies at the age of 88.
2010 Six Nato service members, including three Americans, are killed in Afghanistan.
2012 Iranian nuclear scientist Mustafa Ahmadi Roshan is killed in a car bomb attack in Tehran.
2013 The UAE’s first atlas based on satellite images from DubaiSat 1 has been launched by the Emirates Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST).
2014 Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon dies after eight years in coma.
2015 At least 57 people are killed in bus-oil tanker crash in Khairpur, southern Pakistan.
HIGHLIGHT
1996
Sorrowful farewell to Mitterrand
Kings, princes and presidents bade sorrowful farewell to former president Francois Mitterrand at a requiem in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral as his family and friends buried him in his hometown in southwestern France. Across the country, office workers, school children and even the Paris Metro underground railway paused for a minute’s silence at 11am, as the twin services began. Mitterrand, the longest-serving president of France’s Fifth Republic, refused a state funeral but left detailed plans for his memorial, including dirges by Chopin and Beethoven and a requiem mass by 20th-century French composer Maurice Durufle. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Mitterrand’s partner in more than a decade of energetic European integration, openly wept in Notre Dame and Cuban President Fidel Castro, one of 65 heads of state and government present, also shed tears. Leading the 1,300 French and foreign dignitaries in prayer, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger honoured the deeply spiritual man who, although raised a Roman Catholic, died an agnostic.
