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SCMP Reporter

In Hong Kong

1956: Gregor Piatigorsky, the world's best cellist, arrived in Hong Kong for his concert at the Empire Theatre. The 53-year-old Russian brought his 1714 Stradivarius Battu Cello, ranked one of the world's finest.

1962: Hong Kong was one of the 17 teams to march past Indonesian President Sukarno and 100,000 spectators during the opening ceremonies of the Fourth Asian Games in Jakarta.

1963: Lord Attlee, the former British prime minister from 1945 to 1951, arrived at Kai Tak. During his four-hour stopover, he dropped in at Government House for a visit with the governor, Sir Robert, and Lady Black, before catching a flight to Japan.

1971: Peter Leung, a 23-year-old Hong Kong bowler, set a world record when he fell only 11 pins short of a perfect game with a score of 289 at the FIQ World Tenpin Bowling Championships in Milwaukee, US.

Around the world

79: The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae were destroyed and thousands of people killed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.

1680: Colonel (Thomas) Blood, Irish adventurer who stole the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London in 1671, died. Captured after the theft, he insisted on seeing King Charles II, who pardoned him.

1759: William Wilberforce was born. The English statesman, philanthropist and reformer was instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade in the British West Indies in 1807.

1814: British forces captured Washington and burned down many landmarks in the American capital; President James Madison fled.

1922: Arab states meeting at Nablus rejected the British mandate for Palestine given by the League of Nations.

1965: Saudi Arabia and Egypt signed a ceasefire deal for Yemen. They had been backing the two sides in the Yemeni civil war.

1968: France became the world's fifth nuclear power when it exploded a hydrogen bomb near Fugataufa Atoll, midway between Australia and South America.

1989: Poland appointed as its prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, making it the first country in the Soviet bloc to appoint a non-communist prime minister since the late

1940s.

1991: The parliament of Ukraine declared independence from Moscow.

1994: Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation initialled an accord giving autonomy to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank covering education, health, taxation, social welfare and tourism.

1995: China expelled American human rights activist Harry Wu, just hours after he was sentenced to 15 years in jail for spying.

1995: Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt died. His photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square became one of the best known images of America's joy at Japan's surrender in World War II.

1998: The United States, Britain and the Netherlands agreed on a plan to try two Libyans accused of blowing up a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in the Netherlands under Scottish law.



This day in history