HISTORY AT A GLANCE
TODAY is Saturday, February 4, the 35th day of 2017. There are 330 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1945 – World War II: The British Indian Army and Imperial Japanese Army begin a series of battles known as the Battle of Pokoku and Irrawaddy River operations. 1948 – Ceylon (later renamed Sri Lanka) becomes
independent within the British Commonwealth. 1961 – Angolan War of Independence begins. 1966 – All Nippon Airways Flight 60 plunges into Tokyo Bay,
killing 133. 1969 – Yasser Arafat takes over as chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organization. 1974 – M62 coach bombing: The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) explodes a bomb on a bus carrying offduty British Armed Forces personnel in Yorkshire, England. Nine soldiers and three civilians are killed. 1976 – In Guatemala and Honduras an earthquake kills more
than 22,000. 1980 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini names Abolhassan
Banisadr as president of Iran. 1992 – A coup d’état is led by Hugo Chávez against
Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez. 1997 – En route to Lebanon, two Israeli Sikorsky CH-53 troop-transport helicopters collide in mid-air over northern Galilee, Israel killing 73. 1997 – After at first contesting the results, Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic recognizes opposition victories in the November 1996 elections. 1998 – An earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter Scale in
northeast Afghanistan kills more than 5,000. 1999 – Unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo is shot dead by four plainclothes New York City police officers on an unrelated stake-out, inflaming race relations in the city. 2003 – The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is officially renamed Serbia and Montenegro and adopts a new constitution. 2004 – Facebook, a mainstream online social networking site,
is founded by Mark Zuckerberg. 2006 – A stampede occurs in the PhilSports Arena near
Manila, killing 71 people. 2015 – A TransAsia Airways aircraft with 58 people on board, en route from the Taiwanese capital Taipei to Kinmen, crashes into the Keelung River just after take-off, killing at least 31 people.