The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was wound up. It will be replaced by a new confederation called the Union of Sovereign States. Decision-making will be handed over to a collective presidency, pending the long-term transfer of powers to the Union’s individual republics — whether or not they decide to become fully independent. On one of the most dramatic days of the nation’s fledgling democracy, the Congress of People’s Deputies approved a law to abolish existing power structures and put temporary ones in their place. The Congress also recognised the republics’ right to secede or to determine their level of participation in the confederate state. But republics wishing to secede must first negotiate outstanding issues with the Kremlin.
Other important events:
1839 The First Opium War begins in China.
1864 Combined British, French and Dutch fleets attack Japan in Shimonoseko Straits in reprisal for closing ports and expelling foreigners.
1860 Britain, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia and Turkey sign a treaty to restore order in Syria after massacre of Christians by Druse.
1952 General Carlos Ibanez is elected president of Chile
1905 Treaty of Portsmouth ends Russo-Japanese War.
1972 11 Israeli athletes are killed at the Munich Olympics.
1975 An IRA bombing explodes at Hilton Hotel, Park Lane, London, killing two people..
1980 St Gotthard in the Swiss Alps, the world’s longest auto tunnel, opens.
1986 Commandos of the Pakistan Army storm a hijacked Pan Am Jumbo jet, killing 22 people.
1987 Israeli jets blast Palestinian militant bases near Sidon, Lebanon, killing 41 people and
1996 Ramzi Yousuf, alleged masterminded of 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is convicted with two other men of planning to blow up a dozen US commercial airliners.
1997 Mother Teresa dies of a heart attack
1998 North Korea’s parliament elects Kim Jong Il to the presidency, completing the communist world’s first hereditary succession.
1999 Kenyan star Noah Ngeny breaks the longest standing men’s track world record the 1000m running a time of 2min 11.96sec in Italy.
2000 Tuvalu joins the United Nations.
2001 Peter Bray, a kayaker completes solo Atlantic trip.
2002 Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai survives an assassination attempt in Kandahar.
2005 Mandala Airlines Boeing 737-200 crashes in Indonesia, killing 149 people.
2006 Conservative Felipe Calderon becomes Mexico’s president-elect.
2007 Hundreds of Buddhist monks hold an anti-government protest march in a central Myanmar town.
2008 Europe’s Rosetta space probe makes a successful flyby of the Steins asteroid 250 million miles from Earth.
2010 A landslide buries a major highway and killed 38 people in Guatemala.
2011 Former Karnataka tourism minister and mining baron Janardhan Reddy is arrested on the charges of illegal mining and exports of iron ore.
2012 A powerful explosion at fireworks factory in Sivakasi, India, kills at least 52 people.
2014 Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels agree to a ceasefire, the first step towards ending fighting in eastern Ukraine.
