November 21
1806 Napoleon Bonaparte of France issues Berlin Decrees, declaring blockade of Britain.
1877 Thomas A. Edison announces invention of the phonograph.
1922 Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia is sworn in as the first woman in the US Senate.
1938 Western border areas of Czechoslovakia are forcibly incorporated into German Reich.
1962 China agrees to a ceasefire on India-China border.
1976 Syrian army completes its final phase of occupation of Lebanon.
1977 The supersonic Concorde airliner takes off on its first flight from London to New York City.
1980 A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas kills 87.
1985 Former US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard is arrested and accused of spying for Israel. He pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison.
1990 The Cold War ends as leaders of NATO and Warsaw Pact states sign the Charter of Paris and a treaty on conventional forces in Europe.
1995 The presidents of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia sign peace agreement that would end the three-and-a-half-year-old Balkan war.
1996 A gas explosion at a shoe store in San Juan, Puerto Rico, kills 19 people and injures about 80.
1998 Italian officials release Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the main Kurdish rebel group.
1999 China announces the flight of its first craft capable of carrying a man into space.
2001 Maoist rebel leaders in Nepal withdraw from their four-month-old cease-fire with the government, and launch their worst-ever attacks, killing more than 200 people.
2004 A China Eastern commuter plane crashes into a frozen lake seconds after take off in Inner Mongolia, killing 54 people.
2005 The Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange is opened.
2006 Lebanese minister Pierre Gemayel is gunned down in a carefully orchestrated assassination.
2008 Somali pirates release a hijacked Greek-owned tanker MV Genius with all 19 crew members safe after payment of a ransom.
2009 Emirates NBD unveil a new brand after two years of the merging process.
2012 Ajmal Kasab, a convicted terrorist of the 26/11 attack is hanged at the Yerawada prison in Pune, India.
2013 DubaiSat 2, the UAE’s second earth imaging satellite, is launched into orbit successfully.
HIGHLIGHT
2005
Sri Lanka elects new prime minister
Sri Lanka Freedom Party leader Ratnasiri Wickremanayake sworn in as Prime Minister. He will serve under President Mahinda Rajapakse, who was in a controversial poll which saw nearly half a million voters prevented by rebels of the LTTE from voting. Wickramanayake, 72, is also considered a hardline Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist and served as Minister of Law and Order and Buddhist Affairs under President Chandrika Kumaratunga.He entered politics as a member of the then-Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP), a party that was Marxist and nationalist in approach. The senior-most MP currently in the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), Wickremanayake served as prime minister under Chandrika during her second term of office. His appointment came as a surprise because the front-runners were D.M. Jayaratne, who represented the central highland district of Kandy and who also entered Parliament in 1970 with Rajapakse and SLFP Secretary Maitripla Sirisena.
