Pakistan Nobel laureate and physicist Abdus Salam died. Salam, 70, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, died in London. Born in January 1926 in the Punjab provincial town of Jhang. He was awarded a scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he took a BA (honours) with a double First in mathematics and physics in 1949. Professor Salam was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1979. He was Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate. President Farooq Ahmad Leghari said his death left “a vacuum” which would “not be filled for a long time to come.” Salam was awarded honorary doctorates by as many as 36 universities around the world for his work and was Pakistan’s ambassador at large. His only regret, expressed in a 1995 interview, was that “I have never been able to be of any service to my country. Unfortunately, I have never been given the opportunity.”1877 Thomas A. Edison announces invention of the phonograph.
Other important events
1922 Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia is sworn in as the first woman in the US Senate.
1938 Western border areas of Czechoslovakia are forcibly incorporated into German Reich.
1962 China agrees to a ceasefire on India-China border.
1976 Syrian army completes its final phase of occupation of Lebanon.
1977 The supersonic Concorde airliner takes off on its first flight from London to New York City.
1980 A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas kills 87.
1985 Former US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard is arrested and accused of spying for Israel.
1990 The Cold War ends as leaders of NATO and Warsaw Pact states sign the Charter of Paris and a treaty on conventional forces in Europe.
1991 Eight Soviet republics make an historic pact with the world’s seven richest countries.
1995 The presidents of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia sign peace agreement that would end the three-and-a-half-year-old Balkan war.
1996 A gas explosion at a shoe store in San Juan, Puerto Rico, kills 19 people and injures about 80.
1998 Italian officials release Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the main Kurdish rebel group.
1999 China announces the flight of its first craft capable of carrying a man into space.
2001 Maoist rebel leaders in Nepal withdraw from their four-month-old cease-fire, and launch their worst-ever attacks, killing more than 200 people.
2004 A China Eastern commuter plane crashes into a frozen lake seconds after take off in Inner Mongolia, killing 54 people.
2005 The Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange is opened.
2006 Lebanese minister Pierre Gemayel is gunned down in a carefully orchestrated assassination.
2008 Somali pirates release a hijacked Greek-owned tanker MV Genius with all 19 crew members safe after payment of a ransom.
2009 Emirates NBD unveil a new brand after two years of the merging process.
2012 Ajmal Kasab, a convicted terrorist of the 26/11 attack is hanged at the Yerawada prison in Pune, India.
2013 DubaiSat 2, the UAE’s second earth imaging satellite, is launched into orbit successfully.
2015 A helicoper carrying tourists crashes in Fox Glacier, New Zealand and kill all seven people abroad.
