This Week In History
Feb 10, 2014
Shirley Temple, the child star who charmed Depression-era moviegoers, died aged 85. In later life she became US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia
1949: Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, the tragedy of an ageing salesman haunted by failure, opened on Broadway 1989: Michael Manley became Prime Minister of Jamaica
2004: French MPs voted by a large majority to ban the Islamic headscarf from state schools 2014: High-ranking officials from China and Taiwan met in Nanking, China, for the first time in 65 years
Feb 11, 2016
Scientists announced they had finally detected gravitational waves, the
Feb 12, 1924
In New York, George Gershwin played his haunting composition
Rhapsody In Blue for the first time in public. It established his reputation as a serious composer
2004: San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples 2005: Artists Christo and JeanneClaude created The Gates in New York’s Central Park – 7,503 vinyl gates hung with saffron silk 2009: Researchers in Germany reported the results of a three-year study to map the Neanderthal genome 2014: Demonstrations turned violent in Venezuela over high inflation and other economic problems ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago 1889: A new constitution, creating a western-style two-house parliament, was promulgated in Japan 1997: Archaeologists in Chile discovered evidence of human presence dating back 12,500 years 2009: The communication satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 were destroyed when they collided in space 2009: Morgan Tsvangirai became Zimbabwe’s prime minister in a unity government with Robert Mugabe
Feb 13, 1990
Nelson Mandela, newly released from jail, received a hero’s welcome on his return to Soweto, pledging to end “the dark hell of apartheid” in South Africa
1941: Penicillin, discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, was first used on a human patient 1969: Human eggs were fertilised in a test-tube for the first time 1974: Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was stripped of Soviet citizenship after The Gulag Archipelago was published 2017: Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was killed by poison sprayed into his face at Kuala Lumpur Airport
Feb 14, 1879
La Marseillaise was restored as France’s national anthem. It was written in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget De Lisle to rally soldiers to defend their homeland 1929: The Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in Chicago, as Al Capone’s gang gunned down seven rivals 1939: The German battleship Bismarck was launched 1989: Skyphone, the first satellite telephone service, was launched on a British Airways flight from London to New York 1994: US manufacturers agreed to pay a US$4.75bil settlement to women harmed by silicone breast implants
Feb 15, 1764
French explorers Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau founded the city of St Louis, gateway to the American west, on the west bank of the Mississippi river
1922: The Permanent Court of International Justice, sitting in The Hague in Holland, held its first session 1989: Over 100,000 Soviet troops left Afghanistan 10 years after being sent to help the Marxist government
1993: Scientists announced the discovery of a huge range of volcanoes in deep waters in the South Pacific 2013: A meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, in Siberia, injuring more than 1,000 people
Feb 16, 1959
Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba after heading up a guerrilla campaign that forced right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile
1984: Iran said it had broken through Iraqi defences at the start of a “massive offensive” and claimed to have killed or wounded 1,200 Iraqi soldiers in the first 11 hours of fighting 1994: A prototype European Union police force, Europol,was launched 2005: The Kyoto Protocol came into force, obliging 55 industrialised nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions 2009: Sharia law was implemented in Pakistan’s Swat valley