Earth Summit begins in South Africa
2002 - World leaders, including South African President Nelson Mandela (above, left), gathered at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg said the planet’s future was darkened by poverty and a deteriorating environment, and urged global action to root out these evils. “Our house is burning down and we’re blind to it,” said French President Jacques Chirac (above, right). German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder declared that climate change, inflicted by man’s reckless burning of fossil fuels, had already begun, wreaking floods and drought in three continents. British Prime Minister Tony Blair highlighted famine, war, poverty and disease in Africa. “If Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, we have a duty to heal it,” he said.
September 2
1666 - The Great Fire of London breaks out.
1775 - The first American warship, the Hannah, is commissioned at Marblehead, Massachusetts.
1789 - The US Treasury Department is established.
1796 - The September Massacres, which killed some 1,200 people, begin when an armed band attacks prisoners being transferred between jails in Paris.
1870 - Emperor Napoleon III surrenders at Sedan to encircling German troops.
1900 - Telegraph use between Germany and the US begins.
1930 - French aviators complete the first non-stop air plane flight from Europe to the United States.
1935 - A hurricane slams into the Florida Keys, claiming 423 lives.
1944 - Navy pilot George H.W. Bush is shot down by Japanese forces as he completes a bombing run over the Bonin Islands.
1945 - Japan formally surrenders to the Allies, bringing an end to the Second World War.
1969 - Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Communist leader and father of the nation’s independence movement, dies of heart-attack in Hanoi.
1985 - The Peking-backed Khmer Rouge replaces Pol Pot as its army chief.
1993 - The US and Russia agree to combine efforts in outer space by sharing Mir while jointly designing and building a new international space station.
1996 - Philippines government and Moro National Liberation Front sign a historic peace agreement to end 28 years of civil war.
1998 - A Swissair jetliner crashes off Nova Scotia, killing all 220 aboard.
2001 - Dr Christiaan Barnard, the South African surgeon who performed the world’s first human heart transplant, dies at the age of 78.
2008 - A massive fire breaks out in the lobby of The Atlantis hotel in Dubai.
2012 - Dubai Sports Council appoints Diego Maradona as the Emirate’s Honorary Sports Ambassador.
2013 - American Diana Nyad, 64, and an endurance swimmer, becomes the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage.
