2002 - Beaming broadly, South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth was greeted with eggs and cake as he returned to earth after a 10-day tourist jaunt in space that he called unforgettable. “Every second will be imprinted and will be with me for the rest of my life,” said Shuttleworth, grinning as he was carried away from the Russian Soyuz capsule that bumped him and his two fellow cosmonauts back down to earth in Kazakhstan. “It was a most extraordinary experience,” Shuttleworth said of his trip, which took him to the International Space Station on a ticket reputed to have cost him $20 million (Dh73.56 million). The Soyuz capsule, floating beneath a parachute in the final stages, threw up a cloud of dust as it fell out of a bright blue sky and on to the Kazakh steppe.
Other important events
1570 - Turkey declares war on Venice for refusing to surrender Cyprus.
1821 - France’s Napoleon Bonaparte dies in exile on the island of St Helena.
1824 - British troops take over Rangoon, Myanmar.
1862 - Mexican army defeats invading French forces in the Battle of Puebla.
1936 - Italian forces occupy Addis Ababa, ending Abyssinian War.
1941 - Emperor Haile Selassie returns from exile after Ethiopia’s liberation.
1954 - British athlete Roger Bannister becomes the first person to run a mile in under four minutes.
1955 - Allies restore the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany and it joins Nato.
1965 - First large US military units arrive in Vietnam.
1972 - Alitalia DC-8 crashes west of Palermo, Sicily, killing 115.
1980 - A six-day siege of the Iranian embassy in London ends in explosions, gunfire and bloodshed.
1986 - Syrian President Hafez Assad pays his first visit to Jordan in nine years.
1994 - North and South Yemen clash, starting a civil war.
2002 - Fidel Castro releases from prison one of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents, Vladimiro Roca.
2003 - The Moro Islamic Liberation Front releases 40 of the 100 hostages taken during an attack which left 27 dead and dozens wounded in a remote mining town in the south.
2005 - British Prime Minister Tony Blair wins third term in national election.
2006 - Sixteen-year-old American Michelle Wie becomes the first woman to make the cut in a major men’s Tour event in 61 years after winning SK Telecom Open.
2007 - Bahrain emerges sole owner of Gulf Air after Oman pulls out.
