Today in History

February 4

1874 - British forces under Garnet Wolseley burn Kumasi, Ghana, ending Ashanti War.

1899 - Filipinos stage revolt against the US because independence is not granted.

1922 - Japan agrees to restore Shantung to China.

1938 - Adolf Hitler assumes office of German war minister and names Joachim von Ribbentrop foreign minister.

1945 - US President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin begin a wartime conference at Yalta.

1948 - Sri Lanka becomes a selfgoverning dominion within the British Commonwealth.

1969 - Yasser Arafat takes over as Chairman of the PLO.

1972 - Britain and nine other nations recognise East Pakistan as independent nation of Bangladesh.

1980 - Abul Hassan Bani-Sadr takes office as the first President of Iran.

1981 - Gulf Cooperation Council is formed.

1986 - Police defuses a large bomb found in a third-floor toilet of the Eiffel Tower, just an hour-and-ahalf before it was due to explode.

1990 - Terrorists ambush bus carrying Israeli tourists in Egypt, killing nine people and wounding 20.

1995 - Chechen rebels shoot down first Russian jet fighter of the war, downing an Su-25 with antiaircraft guns near Grozny.

1997 - Nawaz Sharif clinches a landslide victory in Pakistan’s general election.

1998 - A 6.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors in Afghanistan’s remote northeast kill at least 4,500 people.

2004 - Social networking website Facebook is launched.

2006 - Betty Friedan, a founder of the modern feminist movement in US, dies at the age of 85.

2013 - Twenty-four people are killed when a bus and a truck collide on the Al Ain-Abu Dhabi road.

2014 - Satya Nadella becomes the new CEO of Microsoft.

2015 - A plane with 53 passengers crashes in Taipei, Taiwan, killing at least 23 people.

2017 - UN Security Council lifts sanctions on Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.