2001 - Stage and screen star Sir Nigel Hawthorne, who achieved worldwide fame as the scheming British civil servant in the hit BBC television series Yes Minister, died of a heart-attack. As Sir Humphrey Appleby who always knew better than his master, Hawthorne won a host of awards and the glowing approval of Britain’s then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was knighted in 1999. Hawthorne,72, had been battling cancer for the past 18 months and had just come out of hospital where he had received chemotherapy. Another Hawthorne success was the lead role in the 1995 film version of the play The Madness of King George, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Hawthorne died peacefully at home.
Other important events
1805 - Peace of Pressburg is signed between France and Austria.
1865 - American inventor James H. Nason receives patent for the coffee percolator.
1901 - The Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria is completed.
1908 - Jack Johnson becomes the first black heavyweight boxing champion after he knocks out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia.
1932 - Earthquake kills 70,000 in Kansu, China.
1933 - American inventor Edwin H. Armstrong is granted a patent for the FM Radio.
1938 - Pan American Conference approves Declaration of Peru against all foreign intervention.
1941 - Winston Churchill becomes the first British Prime Minister to address a joint session of the US Congress.
1962 - Eight East Germans escape to West Berlin by crashing a bus through barriers at border checkpoint.
1978 - Turkish government imposes martial law in Ankara, Istanbul and 11 southeastern cities.
1991 - Algeria holds its first multiparty parliamentary elections since independence from France in 1962.
1992 - Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic concedes defeat in Serbian presidential elections.
1994 - French anti-terrorist police storm a hijacked airliner at Marseille, killing all four hijackers and saving the lives of some 170 passengers and crew.
1998 - British tycoon Richard Branson is undaunted by the failure of his third round-the-world balloon record attempt.
2003 - A 6.3 magnitude earthquake hits Bam, Iran, killing more than 20,000 people
2004 - The world’s most powerful undersea earthquake off Sumatra unleashes a tsunami that hits Asia and claims more than 216,000 lives.
2006 - Gerald R. Ford, former president of the US, dies at 93.
2007 - A ruptured gasoline pipeline explodes in Lagos, Nigeria, killing 34 people.
2008 - Ahmad Ajtebi becomes the first Arab jockey to gain professional jockey status.
2009 - China unveils the fastest rail link in the world, as the new Guangzhou-Wuhan railway becomes operational.
