1991 - Country music singer Dottie West died during surgery on her ruptured liver. West, 58, was badly injured in a car accident on August 30. She had been in surgery for one-and-a-half hours. It was the third operation for complications in her liver lacerations. West had been on a respirator in intensive care and Dr John A. Morris said, “When you bleed a lot and you have a 60-year-old heart, your heart does not tolerate that blood loss”. West, who has had more than 60 hit songs on country music charts since the early 1960s, was best known for her song Country Sunshine, which became the theme for a soft drink commercial in the 1970s. West was injured when the car in which she was a passenger missed a curb at high speed near the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville.
Other important events
1781 - Los Angeles is founded by Spanish settlers.
1882 - The Edison Electric Illuminating Company fires up its first central generator, supplying current to about 800 light bulbs in New York.
1888 - American inventor George Eastman patents the Kodak camera, the first to use roll film instead of glass plates.
1923 - Noel Coward’s musical revue London Calling! is first performed, in London. It was his first publicly produced musical work.
1929 - German dirigible Graf Zeppelin completes trip around world.
1932 - France and Poland sign mutual assistance agreement.
1939- South Africa and Canada declare war on Germany.
1940- The destroyer Greer becomes the first US vessel fired on in Second World War.
1944 - Finland breaks diplomatic contact with Nazi Germany.
1956 - IBM introduces the world’s first commercial hard disk drive – the 350 Disk Storage Unit.
1957 - Egypt and Syria form economic union.
1960 - Hurricane Donna kills 148 people in Caribbean and US.
1971 - Alaskan 727 crashes into Chilkoot Mountain, killing 109.
1972 - US swimmer Mark Spitz wins a record seventh Olympic gold medal in the 400-metre relay at the Munich Summer Olympics.
1974 - US establishes diplomatic relations with East Germany.
1975 - Representatives of Egypt and Israel sign interim peace agreement in Geneva.
1990 - Prime ministers of South and North Korea meet for first time.
1993 - Fighting breaks out in eastern Liberia.
1998 - Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University, California.
1999 - East Timor votes for independence.
2002 - An Indonesian court convicts parliament speaker Akbar Tandjung of corruption.
2007 - Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is elected head of Iran’s Assembly of Experts.
2015 - Fifty-two Emirati soldiers are martyred when their ammunition depot is targeted by a rocket in Yemen.
