February 13
1689 English Parliament adopts a Bill of Rights.
1795 The first US state university opens in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1816 The Teatro di San Carlo opera house in Naples, Italy is destroyed by fire.
1856 Britain annexes Oudh, in India, increasing further hostility to British rule.
1920 The League of Nations recognises Switzerland’s neutrality.
1935 American cardiac surgeon Claude Beck carries out the first surgical operation to successfully relieve angina in humans in Cleveland, Ohio.
1945 Allied forces capture Budapest, Hungary, in the Second World War.
1952 Rocky Marciano defeats Lee Savold for his 39th straight win.
1960 France detonates its first atomic bomb.
1976 Nigerian junta leader General Murtala Ramat Mohammad is assassinated.
1984 Konstantin Chernenko succeeds Yuri Andropov as Soviet leader.
1990 The American space probe Voyager I snaps a photo of the entire solar system.
1994 Somali gunmen kidnap two Italian aid workers and an Egyptian UN peacekeeper is killed.
1996 Israeli troops seal off the West Bank and Gaza to prevent terrorist attacks.
1997 Rebels under Laurent Kabila take Zairian town of Faradje while advancing on country’s third largest city, Kisangani.
2000 Top seed Nicolas Kiefer lifts the Duty Free Dubai Tennis Open.
2003 Police arrested a Venezuelan man carrying a live hand grenade at Britain’s Gatwick airport.
2004 Chechnya’s exiled former president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev is assassinated in Doha.
2005 A Shiite bloc wins Iraq’s first election since Saddam Hussain’s overthrow.
2006 RAK Airways is launched in Ras Al Khaimah.
2007 North Korea agrees with US and four regional powers on nuclear disarmament plan.
2008 One of the world’s most wanted and elusive terrorists, Emad Mughniyeh, is killed in Syria.
2010 A bomb rips through a packed restaurant in the Indian city of Pune, killing at least eight.
2012 A lightweight rocket aimed at securing Europe a stake in the market to launch small satellites lifts off from Kourou space base on its maiden flight.
2014 Mount Kelud, considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes on the main island of Java, erupts in Indonesia.
2015 Taliban militants storm a Shiite mosque in northwest Pakistan, killing at least 18 people.
2017 A tour bus flips over on Taiwan highway, killing 28 people.
HIGHLIGHT
BCCI creditors get big boost from UK court
1998- Creditors of the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) were given a boost by a British court ruling allowing them to pursue claims against one of BCCI’s auditors. “We consider this judgement a very satisfactory result for the creditors of BCCI,” Christopher Morris of accountants Deloitte & Touche, which is acting on behalf of BCCI’s liquidators said in a statement. Earlier, the Court of Appeal unanimously overturned a ruling which had struck out claims brought by one of three BCCI firms against accountants Ernst & Whinney, a predecessor of accounting giant Ernst & Young. The appeal court also refused an application by the Ernst & Whinney defendants for leave to appeal to the House of Lords over its judgement. BCCI collapsed in 1991 with debts of more than $12 billion leaving depositors with vast losses and spawning a prolonged legal battle to get funds back and prosecute those involved in the complex fraud which brought about the bank’s downfall.
