Rogge elected as IOC president
2001 - Belgian Jacques Rogge was elected to lead the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the next eight years. The 59-year-old surgeon succeeded former Spanish diplomat Juan Antonio Samaranch, who steps down after 21 years in the world’s top sports post. Signalling a new beginning for an organisation, which has been harshly criticised after the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, Rogge pledged to protect the Olympic movement against “doping, corruption and violence. The very first challenge for the International Olympic committee is to have a very successful Salt Lake City Games and we will unite everyone to help our American friends in this endeavour”, he said. Rogge will be in charge for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Other important events
1809 - Revolt breaks out in upper Peru against Spanish authority.
1910 - John Robertson Duigan makes the first flight of the Duigan pusher biplane, the first aircraft built in Australia.
1909 - Mohammad Ali, shah of Persia, is deposed in favour of 12-year-old Sultan Ahmad Shah.
1918 - Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children are executed by the Bolsheviks.
1921 - Greek forces defeat Turks at Kutania in Turkey.
1925 - First elected parliament in Iraq opens in Baghdad.
1935 - The world’s first parking meter is installed in Oklahoma City.
1945 - First atomic bomb is exploded by the United States over the desert in New Mexico.
1948 - The Vickers Viscount, the world’s first turbine-propeller aircraft, makes its maiden flight in Australia.
1965 - The Mont Blanc Tunnel linking France and Italy opens.
1979 - Saddam Hussain takes over as President of Iraq.
1981 - Dr Mahathir Mohammad is sworn in as Malaysian Prime Minister.
1990 - Ukraine declares independence.
1994 - The first fragment from comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashes into Jupiter, creating a 1,930km-wide fireball.
1995 - Amazon.com opens its website to the public.
1996 - Ukraine’s Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko narrowly escapes an assassination attempt when a bomb explodes near his motorcade in Kiev.
1999 - John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and her sister are killed when their single-engine plane crashes into the Atlantic Ocean.
2001 - The leaders of Russia and China sign their first friendship treaty for half a century.
2004 - A major fire sweeps through a school complex in Tamil Nadu, killing 90 schoolchildren.
2007 - A 6.8 magnitude earthquake strikes northwestern Japan, killing at least eight people.
2012 - An Indian fisherman dies and three of his compatriots are injured after a US ship fires on their small boat off Jebel Ali Port in UAE.
2014 - UAE announces plan to launch a Mars probe by 2021, making it the first Arab country to make the 60-million km journey.
