HISTORY AT A GLANCE
TODAY is Monday, February 13, the 44th day of 2017. There are 321 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1955 – Israel obtains four of the seven Dead Sea Scrolls.
1960 – With the success of a nuclear test codenamed “Gerboise Bleue”, France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons.
1967 – American researchers discover the Madrid Codices by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Library of Spain.
1971 – Vietnam War: Backed by American air and artillery support, South Vietnamese troops invade Laos.
1978 – Hilton bombing: a bomb explodes in a refuse truck outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia, killing two refuse collectors and a policeman.
1979 – An intense windstorm strikes western Washington and sinks a 1/2-mile-long section of the Hood Canal Bridge.
1984 – Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1990 – German reunification: An agreement is reached on a two-stage plan to reunite Germany.
1991 – Gulf War: Two laser-guided “smart bombs” destroy the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. Allied forces said the bunker was being used as a military communications outpost, but over 400 Iraqi civilians inside were killed.
2000 – The last original “Peanuts” comic strip appears in newspapers one day after Charles M. Schulz dies.
2001 – An earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter magnitude scale hits El Salvador, killing at least 400.
2004 – The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe’s largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star “Lucy” after The Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
2007 – Taiwan opposition leader Ma Ying-jeou resigns as the chairman of the Kuomintang party after being indicted on charges of embezzlement during his tenure as the mayor of Taipei; Ma also announces his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election.
2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations.
2012 – The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted the first launch of the European Vega rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
2013 – A plane crash kills five people and injures nine others in Donetsk, Ukraine.