In Hong Kong 1968: Ho Cheung-yau scored a late equaliser to give the national team a 2-2 draw with FC Lucerne of Switzerland in front of only 2,990 spectators at Hong Kong Stadium. 1974: The Mandarin Oriental Hotel announced a month-long engagement with singer Eartha Kitt. Orson Welles, the legendary American actor/film director, once called her the most talented performer he had met. 1975: Tomio Yokoyama, the first Japanese jockey invited to ride in Hong Kong's annual invitation series, won the Invitation Cup on Palinurus. 1986: Steve James scored two tries against the run of the play as the Police beat the Tigers 22-6 to win the First Division Rugby Championship at King's Park. Around the world 1650: Rene Descartes, French philosopher and mathematician, died. He is sometimes described as the father of modern philosophy. 1884: The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. 1893: Thomas Edison opened the world's first film studio in West Orange, New Jersey. 1896: Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's opera, La Boheme, was first staged in Turin. 1920: The North West Mounted Police became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 1934: Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved all political parties except his own Fatherland Front. 1958: Egypt and Syria proclaimed the union of their two countries in a state to be known as 'The United Arab Republic'. 1963: Kamuzu Banda was sworn in as first prime minister of Nyasaland (Malawi). 1966: US comedy film actor and director Buster Keaton died. He starred in and directed many silent classics, including Our Hospitality. 1974: More than 220 people died in a fire in a newly-built skyscraper in Sao Paulo, Brazil. 1979: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran from Paris after 15 years of exile spent mainly in Iraq. 1982: The Confederation of Senegambia was formally launched. 1990: Yugoslavia deployed troops, tanks and warplanes in Kosovo province, where police were battling ethnic Albanians demanding political reforms. 1991: South African President F W De Klerk opened Parliament with a speech promising the demolition of the remaining pillars of apartheid. 1991: More than 1,200 people were killed when an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale hit Afghanistan and Pakistan. 1992: Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin signed the Camp David declaration, stating that their two countries, the USA and the USSR, no longer regard each other as adversaries. 1995: Communist Vietnam raised its red flag in Washington for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War as the two former foes opened liaison offices in each others' capital. 2000: Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said they had traced the origin of the Aids virus to around 1930.
