Algerian independence fighter Mohammad Boudiaf, exiled for 27 years and condemned to death by his own country, returned home to become the head of state. Algeria’s new leadership, which cancelled multi-party elections that looked certain to bring fundamentalists to power, laid on a red-carpet welcome. But the cheerful-looking 72-year-old Boudiaf, who helped set up the force that fought Algeria’s French colonial rulers, faced a growing challenge to the legality of his position. “As in the past, I promise the Algerian people I will give them all my efforts to guarantee their prosperity and to serve them,” he said after stepping from the white, three-engined executive jet that brought him to Algiers Airport from Morocco.
Other important events:
1666 France, allied with Holland, declares war on England.
1761 British take Pondicherry after siege, marking the end of French dominion in India.
1778 France recognises US independence.
1816 Portugal’s South American colony, Brazil, becomes a kingdom.
1909 British explorer Ernest Shackleton finds magnetic south pole.
1920 Georgia declares independence.
1924 Eleftherios Venizelos becomes Prime Minister of Greece for the fourth time.
1925 Leon Trotsky is dismissed from chairmanship of Russia’s Revolutionary Council.
1942 Actress Carole Lombard, 33, dies in a plane crash near Las Vegas.
1966 Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi takes over power in Nigeria.
1969 Soviet cosmonauts achieve first linkup of two manned spaceships while in orbit.
1971 Swiss ambassador to Brazil, Giovanni Enrico Bucher, is freed in Rio de Janeiro after being held by kidnappers for 40 days.
1973 US and South Vietnam declare ceasefire in Vietnam War in hopes of full peace pact.
1979 Shah of Iran flees into exile.
1987 Hu Yaobang resigns as head of China’s Communist Party
1991 US-led forces attack targets in Kuwait and Iraq and ‘liberation of Kuwait has begun’.
1992 El Salvador government signs a pact with rebels ending 12 years of civil war.
1992 A special high court in Greece acquits former Socialist Premier Andreas Papandreou of involvement in a $210-million (Dh771.3 million) bank embezzlement scheme
1995 Five-hundred motorists are stranded in the Jawahar tunnel in northern India by a snowslide that killed at least 183 people.
1996 Sierra Leone’s military ruler Valentine Strasser is ousted in a coup
2000 Ricardo Lagos is elected Chile’s first socialist president.
2001 Laurent Kabila, president of Congo, is killed in a shooting at his home.
2006 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is sworn in as Liberia’s new President. She becomes Africa’s first female elected head of state.
2008 The first batch of female Emirati pilots graduate from Khalifa Air College in Al Ain.
2009 Zimbabwe unveils its 100 trillion dollar note.
2012 At least 19 people are killed and 16 others feared trapped in the rubble of a run-down apartment block that collapsed in Beirut.
2013 A helicopter crashes into a crane on top of one of Europe’s tallest residential blocks in Central London, killing two people.
2016 Pro-independence party candidate Tsai Ing-wen wins in Taiwan’s presidential election.
