Also on this day

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky dies.

The Beatles, including John Lennon, right, are watched by 73 million as they appear on the Ed Sullivan Show.

A bomb in Canary Wharf kills two, marking the end of an 18-month Provisional IRA ceasefire.

When the R-7 was declared operational, Cold War tensions reached new levels.

However, the R-7 wasn’t terribly effective. Its launch zones were enormously expensive and huge – easily spotted, in fact, by the U2 spy planes America was flying over the USSR.

In the outbreak of war, the R-7 batteries would have been among the first targets.

In addition, the missiles took time to deploy and could not be launched without hours of preparation. Fewer than 10 years after being readied for war, the R-7 dropped out of the Russian arsenal.

The effort wasn’t wasted, however. Just as the scientists behind the Nazi V2 rockets helped put Man on the Moon, so too did the R-7 design pay dividends outside the military sphere. It is still the basis for almost all

Russian space launchers, including the Soyuz craft. These vessels are used in ferrying passengers to and from the International Space Station... the rockets designed to destroy the US are now used to carry its astronauts.

Question: Which tennis tournament was founded on this day in 1900?

Last week I asked which Second World

War battle ended in a German surrender on February 2, 1943. The answer is THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD.