Today in History
September 8
1664 - The Dutch surrender New Amsterdam to the British, who rename it New York.
1831 - Russia takes Warsaw after two-day battle, and Polish revolt collapses.
1900 - Galveston, Texas, is struck by a hurricane that kills about 6,000 people.
1926 - Germany is admitted to League of Nations.
1928 - The first US cross-country airmail service begins operating between San Francisco, California and New York.
1934 Luxury passenger ship Morro Castle for New Jersey catches fire, 133 die.
1941 - Germans begin an 872-day siege of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, Russia.
1943 US Air Forced bombed the German General Headquarters for the Mediterranean zone in Frascati, Italy during World War II.
1944 - The first of more than 1,000 German V-2 ballistic missiles land in Britain.
1951 - A peace treaty with Japan is signed by 48 other nations in San Francisco.
1969 - Sulaiman Maghrabi is appointed premier of Libya.
1974 - US President Gerald Ford grants an unconditional pardon to former president Richard Nixon.
1975 - Guinee-Bissau declares independence.
1993 - Gunmen in Johannesburg, South Africa kill at least 21 black commuters and wound 25.
1996 Michael Schumacher drove his Ferrari to victory in Italian Grand Prix.
1997 - Zaire’s ousted president Mobutu Sese Seko dies in Morocco after a long battle with cancer.
1998 An oil slick tarnished the beaches of Al Bedyah and Sharm villages on the East Coast.
2000 - Albania officially joins the World Trade Organisation.
2002 - South and North Korea agree to open permanent facilities for reunions of families separated by their Cold War division.
2005 A Sri Lankan woman is killed in a stampede at Colombo international airport that was triggered by a bomb scare on a Saudi Arabian Airlines plane.
2006 Two bombs tear through a crowd of Muslim worshippers in Malegaon, India, killing 37 people.
2008 A landslide at an illegal mining operation in northern China kills at least 260 people.
2009 Thirty-five miners are killed by an explosion at an illegal coal mine in central China.
2012 - New visa agreement is signed by India and Pakistan that will facilitate two-day travel and trade and people-to-people interaction.
2013 Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari steps down at the end of his five-year term, becoming the first democratically elected president to complete his full term in office.
2014 The Mohammad Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation opens in Dubai.
HIGHLIGHT
1995
Bosnia breakthrough in Geneva
Negotiators claim a breakthrough towards peace in former Yugoslavia, agreeing in Geneva on basic principles to divide Bosnia between ethnic Serbs and a Muslim-Croat alliance. But there was no let up in Nato air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets to drive home UN demands that the separatist Serbs lift the siege of Sarajevo. Nato and the US. insists the peace process is a separate issue from air strikes which they say are to enforce the UN demands, not to drive the Serbs to the negotiating table or take sides with the Muslim-led government army. In Geneva, US envoy Richard Holbrooke hail the agreement among foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and the Serb-led rump Yugoslavia as a “milestone in the search for peace”. The Geneva agreement acknowledges the Bosnian Serb entity of the Republika Srpska and a 51-49 division of territory between the Serbs and the Muslim-Croat federation within the current borders of the internationally recognised state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
