Thailand’s deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra resigned from his once all-powerful party in a letter faxed from London after more than 200 colleagues quit the organisation as it crumbled following a military coup. Thaksin insisted his Thai Rak Thai party would survive but other key members and analysts pronounced the mass exodus and Thaksin’s resignation as the death knell for the party that had controlled Thai politics since 2001. “I have to resign because of the current atmosphere and to protect the future of the party,” Thaksin said in a three-page handwritten letter that marked his first formal statement since a military council ousted him from power on September 19. In the letter, Thaksin defended himself against accusations of wrongdoing.
Other important events
1866 Italy and Austria sign a peace treaty. Austria surrenders Venice and the surrounding region to Italy.
1899 Settlement of British Guiana-Venezuela boundary dispute.
1922 Rebecca L. Felton, a Democrat from Georgia, is the first woman elected to the US Senate.
1929 Name of Serbo-Croat-Slovene Kingdom is changed to Yugoslavia.
1932 Iraq joins League of Nations as British mandate ends.
1952 Britain conducts its first atomic bomb test off the coast of Australia.
1954 Foreign ministers of seven West European nations, the US and Canada agree to allow West Germany to join the Nato.
1963 The Honduran armed forces oust Ramon Villeda Morales as president in a violent coup d’etat.
1968 Leftist military coup in Peru ousts President Fernando Balaunde Terry.
1973 Willi Stoph becomes the leader of East Germany.
1981 Ali Khamenei wins Iran’s presidential elections by a landslide.
1988 Indian hostage Mithileshwar Singh is freed in Beirut after 20 months and 10 days’ captivity.
1988 The space shuttle Discovery lands safely putting the seal on America’s return to manned space flight.
1990 East and West Germany merge to become Germany.
1993 At least 12 US Army soldiers are killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, in a 15-hour battle with supporters of Somali warlord General Mohammed Farah Aidid.
1994 Jordan and Israel sign a peace agreement.
1995 Former US football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the 1994 slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
1996 US, Britain, China, France and Russia sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
1998 10,000 Turkish soldiers cross into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebels.
2003 Pakistan test-fires nuclear capable Hatf-III missile.
2005 India and Pakistan sign pact on missile tests.
2006 Europe’s first lunar mission crash lands on the moon.
2007 About 3,000 miners are trapped underground when a water pipe bursts, probably causing a shaft to collapse in a South African gold mine.
2008 OJ Simpson is found guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping.
2013 Former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav sentence to spend five years in jail in the fodder scam case.
2014 Nine United Nations peacekeepers from Niger are killed in north-eastern Mali.
