2005: China’s second manned mission in orbit
China launched its second manned space mission, sending two astronauts into orbit as it opened a new chapter in its ambitious drive to become a global space power. Shenzhou VI, based on Soviet Soyuz technology, lifted off on a Long March 2F carrier rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre for a five-day mission, carrying air force pilots Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng. Having two crew on board is a departure from October 2003, when Yang Liwei spent 21 hours on a solo odyssey a mission that made China only the third country after the United States and the former Soviet Union to send a man into space. Fei, 40, and Nie, 41, were seen off at the launch pad by Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who said he believed “the astronauts will accomplish the glorious and sacred mission”. “The entire nation has waited, the entire world is watching the success of the Shenzhou VI manned space launch,” he said.
Other events
1822 - Brazil becomes independent of Portugal.
1879 - British troops occupy Kabul, Afghanistan.
1933 - Bank robber John Dillinger escapes from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang.
1934 - Peter II becomes King of Yugoslavia following the assassination of his father, King Alexander.
1942 - US forces defeat the Japanese in Battle of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal in the Second World War.
1945 - Allied Control Council in Germany orders dissolution of Nazi Party after Second World War.
1964 - US forces take control in South Vietnam, ousting government of Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh.
1969 - Soviet Union launches Soyuz VII spacecraft.
1973 - Juan Peron returns as President of Argentina after 18 years in exile.
1984 - An Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at a hotel in Brighton, England, where British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was attending a conference, killing five people.
1992 - A strong earthquake near Cairo kills more than 500 people.
1995 - Panama grants asylum to Haiti’s Raoul Cedras, who had taken power in a 1991 coup.
1996 - Wonder Land is inaugurated in Dubai.
1997 - Cuban President Fidel Castro appoints his brother Raul as successor.
1998 - Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw his forces from Kosovo.
1999 - General Pervez Musharraf seizes power in a military coup in Pakistan.
2000 - Seventeen sailors are killed in a suicide bomb attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen
2001 - UN and its Secretary-General Kofi Annan win the Nobel Peace Prize.
2002 - A bomb explodes in a resort area on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people.
2004 - Saudi security forces killed three suspected militants in a shootout near a housing compound for foreigners.
2005 - Syrian Interior Minister Gazi Kanaan commits suicide in his office in Al Marjah, Damascus.
2008 - American computer game designer Richard Garriott reaches space aboard a Russian rocket, fulfilling a childhood dream.
2009 - American Elinor Ostrom becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
2011 - The Royal Opera House of Oman, the first of its kind in the Arabian Peninsula, is officially opened.
2014 - Lewis Hamilton wins the inaugural Russian Grand Prix.
