South Africa’s 21-year absence from world cricket ended at the sport’s traditional headquarters at Lord’s. Their return to the international arena was announced by Colin Cowdrey, chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC), the game’s world ruling authority. Cowdrey said the ICC recognised the new body for cricket in South Africa, the United Cricket Board of South Africa, and elected them to full membership “with immediate effect”. South Africa had been isolated from Test cricket since 1970 because of the republic’s apartheid policy. Now the South Africans will be able to play against black countries such as West Indies, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka as well as the white nations, England, Australia and New Zealand — which were their only opponents.
Other important events:
1866 Edson Clark from Massachusetts is granted the first US patent for an indelible pencil.
1890 Wyoming becomes the 44th state of the US.
1913 Romania declares war on Bulgaria.
1923 Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini dissolves all non-fascist political parties in order to secure his dictatorship.
1925 TASS, the official news agency of the Soviet Union, is established.
1938 American aviator Howard Hughes completes a 91-hour flight around the world, breaking the previous record by over 4 hours.
1962 Telstar satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing live television from the US to Europe for the first time.
1973 Bahamas gains independence after three centuries of British rule.
1978 President Moktar Ould Daddah flees Mauritania after a bloodless military coup.
1985 Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior is bombed by French saboteurs in Auckland.
1989 Rocket barrage kills 20 people in Kabul, Afghanistan.
1990 Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev is re-elected leader of Soviet Communist Party.
1991 Boris Yeltsin is sworn in as the first elected president of Russia.
1992 Ousted Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega is sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for drug trafficking.
1993 Melchior Ndadaye becomes President of Burundi.
1995 Burma’s military junta frees Aung San Suu Kyi without condition after nearly six years under house arrest.
1996 Unmanned Galileo spacecraft captures stunning close-up pictures of Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon.
1999 Six nations fighting in Congo’s civil war sign a long-awaited peace accord.
2000 A mountain of garbage loosened by rain collapses and bursts into flames in Manila, Philippines, killing 216 people.
2006 Nobel laureate Jose Ramos-Horta assumes office as East Timor’s new prime minister.
2007 Pakistani troops storm the compound of Islamabad’s Red Mosque after a week-long standoff. At least 50 rebels and eight soldiers are killed.
2009 Pope Benedict XVI stresses the church’s opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with US President Barack Obama.
2012 Kenya’s Internal Security Minister George Saitori was killed along with five others in a police helicopter after it crashed near Nairobi.
2013 More than 30 people were buried by a landslide in Zhongxing province in China.
2014 UAE opens new consulate in Canada.
2015 Egyptian-born film actor Omar Sharif dies in Cairo at the age of 83.