2003 - Giovanni Agnelli, the powerful honorary chairman of the Fiat auto company and one of the most celebrated of Italy’s business barons, died after months of illness in Turin. He was 81. The aged Fiat patriarch’s death ends an era for the Italian conglomerate that in recent years has suffered grave financial problems. Agnelli had been suffering from prostate cancer, and recently underwent treatment in New York. Officials said his wife, daughter and other family members were present. The announcement came on the day that the Agnelli family held a key meeting of its holding company, during which Giovanni Agnelli had been expected to hand over the reins to younger brother Umberto Agnelli. Words of mourning and recollections of Agnelli’s role in modern Italian history filled Italian airwaves.
Other important events
1848 - James Marshall finds gold nugget in the US state of California, touching off Gold Rush of ‘49.
1908 - The first Boy Scout troop is organised in England by Robert Baden-Powell.
1924 - Petrograd is renamed Leningrad in honour of the founder of the Soviet Union.
1925 - Rickard Sandler becomes Prime Minister of Sweden.
1936 - Albert Sarraut becomes Prime Minister of France following Pierre Laval’s resignation over the Abyssinia crisis.
1939 - The deadliest earthquake strikes in Chile, approximately 28,000 people are killed.
1943 - US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill conclude a wartime conference in Casablanca, Morocco.
1946 - UN General Assembly votes to create UN Atomic Energy Commission.
1965 - Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill dies in London at 90.
1966 - Indira Gandhi becomes Prime Minister of India for the first time.
1978 - A nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunges through Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrates, scattering radioactive debris.
1985 - Space shuttle Discovery is launched in Nasa’s first secret military flight.
1986 - British Trade Minister Leon Brittan resigns over the Westland affair.
1991 - Lithuania asks Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from buildings seized in the Baltic republic.
1996 - Polish Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy, accused of spying for Moscow for 13 years, resigns.
2000 - A huge oil spill threatens the Abu Dhabi coastline after a ship sank seven miles offshore.
2001 - Britain’s Peter Mandelson, the minister in charge of Northern Ireland, resigns.
2002 - Former Christian warlord Elie Hobeika is killed by a car bomb.
2006 - Canadians elect their first Conservative government in 12 years.
2007 - Russia and India strike new arms deals on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s visit.
2008 - A military plane carrying officers home from a flight-safety conference crashes in Poland, killing all 20 people on board.