HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Wednesday, February 8, the 39th day of 2017. There are 326 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1942 – World War II: Japan invades Singapore. 1952 – Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United

Kingdom. 1960 – Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom issues an Order-in-Council, stating that she and her family would be known as the House of Windsor, and that her descendants will take the name“MountbattenWindsor ”. 1962 – Charonne massacre. Nine trade unionists are killed by French police at the instigation of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, then chief of the Paris Prefecture of Police. 1963 – Travel, financial and commercial transactions by United States citizens to Cuba are made illegal by the John F. Kennedy administration. 1963 – The first full color television program in the world, publicly advertised, is broadcast in Mexico City by XHGC-TV, Channel 5, due to technical breakthrough advances made by Mexican engineer Guillermo González Camarena. 1963 – The regime of Prime Minister of Iraq, Brigadier General

Abd al-Karim Qasim is overthrown by the Ba’ath Party. 1965 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 663 crashes into the Atlantic

Ocean and explodes, killing everyone aboard. 1971 – South Vietnamese ground troops launch an incursion into Laos to try to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail and stop communist infiltration. 1974 – After 84 days in space, the crew of Skylab 4, the last crew to visit American space station Skylab, returns to Earth. 1981 – Twenty-one association football spectators are trampled to death at Karaiskakis Stadium in Neo Faliro, Greece, after a football match between Olympiacos F.C. and AEK Athens F.C. 1986 – Hinton train collision: Twenty-three people are killed when a VIA Rail passenger train collides with a 118car Canadian National freight train near the town of Hinton, Alberta, west of Edmonton. It is the worst rail accident in Canada until the Lac-Mégantic, Quebec derailment in 2013 which killed forty-seven people. 2013 – A blizzard disrupts transportation and leaves hundreds of thousands of people without electricity in the Northeastern United States and parts of Canada. 2014 – A hotel fire in Medina, Saudi Arabia kills 15 Egyptian

pilgrims with 130 also injured.