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1606 - Sir Everard Digby, Thomas Winter, John Grant and Thomas Bates who, along with others, had tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in November 1605 were hanged, drawn and quartered for their part in the Gunpowder Plot.

1649 - The executioner Richard Brandon beheaded King Charles I at Whitehall. The courts deemed him a 'tyrant, traitor, murderer and enemy of the people'.

1661 - Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, was exhumed and formally executed, after having been dead for two years.

1790 – The first boat specializing as a lifeboat is tested on the River Tyne.

1835 – In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen.

1948 – Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi known for his non-violent freedom struggle is assassinated by Pandit Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist.

1965 - The state funeral, in London, of Sir Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Britain. It was the biggest state funeral of its kind since the burial of the Duke of Wellington in 1852.

1969 - The Beatles' played their last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert was broken up by the police.

2003 - Richard Reid (the shoe bomber), was found guilty on terrorism charges in a federal court in Boston.

1606 - Guy Fawkes, one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, was hanged, drawn and quartered. Known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, Fawkes belonged to a group of provincial English Catholics who had planned the failed Plot in November 1605.

1788 - Death, in Rome, of Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie). After his father's death, Charles was recognised as 'King Charles III' by his supporters.

1867 - The four bronze lions at the base of Nelson's Column were completed.

1876 – The United States orders all Native Americans to move into reservations.

1910 - American-born murderer Dr Hawley Crippen poisoned his wife before cutting her into small pieces and burying her in the cellar of his home in London.

1917 – World War I: Germany announces that its U-boats will resume unrestricted submarine warfare after a two-year hiatus.

1918 – A series of accidental collisions on a misty Scottish night leads to the loss of two Royal Navy submarines with over a hundred lives, and damage to another five British warships.

1930 – 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.

1953 - 307 people were killed when the Thames estuary broke its banks, flooding large areas of Kent and Essex.

1958 - The United States entered the Space Age with its first successful launch of a satellite (Explorer I) into orbit.

1983 - It became compulsory to wear car seat belts in Britain.

1994 - German based BMW bought the Rover Group from British Aerospace for £800M then sold Land Rover alone for £1.8Bn.

2003: Columbia shuttle disintegrates killing seven
The US space shuttle Columbia has broken up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere killing all seven astronauts on board.
This is the first time there has been an accident on landing in the 42 years of American space flight.

President George Bush told a nation in shock: "The Columbia is lost. There are no survivors."

Six of the seven astronauts were US citizens. They were Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, and female astronauts Laurel Clark and Indian-born Kalpana Chawla.

The seventh - fighter pilot Colonel Ilan Ramon - was Israel's first astronaut and was carrying with him a miniature Torah scroll of a Holocaust survivor.

Columbia disintegrated just 16 minutes before it was due to land at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

At 0900 local time (1400 GMT) Mission Control lost all data and contact with the crew.

The US space agency Nasa then sent search teams to the Dallas-Fort Worth area amid reports of "a big bang" and TV pictures showing smoke and fireballs in the sky.

Debris scattered over Texas

In an emotional announcement, Nasa's administrator Sean O'Keefe, said: "This is indeed a tragic day for the Nasa family, for the families of the astronauts and likewise, tragic for the nation."

Flags at the Kennedy Space Center have been lowered to half-mast.

Debris from the shuttle is scattered across eastern Texas and western Louisiana and has crashed into car parks, forests, backyards, a reservoir, a rooftop and a dentist's office.

Nasa has temporarily suspended shuttle flights. Shuttle programme manager Ron Dittemore told a news conference in Houston, Texas, "We will not fly again until we have this understood. Somewhere along the line we missed something."

The finger of blame points to a piece of insulating foam from an external fuel tank that hit the shuttle's left wing as it took off 16 days ago.

Some experts say this could have damaged tiles that protect the craft from intense heat on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

But the lead flight director in mission control, Leroy Cain, assured journalists engineers had concluded any damage to the spacecraft was considered minor.

The shuttle was the world's first reusable space vehicle and Columbia was the oldest of a fleet of four and flew her maiden voyage in April 1981.

Her sister ship Challenger exploded soon after take-off 17 years ago killing six astronauts and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.


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The shuttle fell to pieces 16 minutes before it was due to land


In-depth look at the Columbia tragedy






In Context
Three days later President Bush led a memorial service to the seven astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
In a statement the families of the astronauts insisted the tragedy should not hamper future space programs.

An independent investigation team spent months studying data recovered from computers tracking Columbia's final moments, and thousands of pieces of recovered debris.

The final conclusions of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, published in August 2003, confirmed the view that a breach of the shuttle's heat shield on take-off caused it to break up on re-entry.

But it was also highly critical of Nasa itself, saying management blunders were as much to blame as technical problems for the destruction of the shuttle.

It also said that while the space shuttle was not inherently unsafe, a number of mechanical changes should be made in order to ensure safety before flights resume.

It made 29 major recommendations aimed at both a short-term return to space and continuing exploration in the long term.


Stories From 1 Feb
2003: Columbia shuttle disintegrates killing seven
1979: Exiled Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran
1953: Violent storms claim hundreds of lives
1994: MPs condemn sale of Rover
1952: Test drive for TV detector vans
1984: Halfpenny coin to meet its maker


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_...efault.stm

1327 - Fourteen year old Edward III was crowned King of England, but the country was ruled by his mother Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer.

1587 - Under pressure from her Council, Queen Elizabeth I of England signed the warrant authorising the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

1709 - Scotsman Alexander Selkirk was rescued from an uninhabited desert island (Mas à Tierra, off the coast of Chile), inspiring the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.

1793 – French Revolutionary Wars: France declares war on the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

1884 - The first volume (A-Ant) of the Oxford English Dictionary was published.

1893 – Thomas A. Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey.

1920 – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police begins operations.

1946 – The Parliament of Hungary abolishes the monarchy after nine centuries, and proclaims the Hungarian Republic.

1952 - The first TV detector van was demonstrated. It enabled the BBC to track down users of unlicensed television sets in Britain.

1957 – Felix Wankel's first working prototype DKM 54 of the Wankel engine runs at the NSU research and development department Versuchsabteilung TX in Germany

1968 – Canada's three military services, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force, are unified into the Canadian Forces.

1974 - Escaped Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs was arrested by Brazilian police in Rio. He escaped extradition because he was the father of a child by his Brazilian girlfriend.

1978 – Director Roman Polanski skips bail and flees the United States to France after pleading guilty to charges of engaging in sex with a 13-year-old girl.

1979 - Trevor Francis, aged 24, became the first £1m footballer in England, signing for Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest.

2004 – Janet Jackson's breast is exposed during the half-time show of Super Bowl XXXVIII, resulting in US broadcasters adopting a stronger adherence to Federal Communications Commission censorship guidelines.

2009 – Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is chosen the first female Prime Minister of Iceland, becoming the first openly gay head of government in the modern world.

1915 - Sir Stanley Matthews, the first English footballer to receive the knighthood, is born in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Matthews

1917 - World War I - Germany begins its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. This included sinking merchant and hospital ships on sight.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/on_this_day/

1968 - Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, is born at Baptist Memorial Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Marie_Presley

1536 - The Argentine city of Buenos Aires was founded by Pedro de Mendoza of Spain.

1665 - British forces captured New Amsterdam, the centre of the Dutch colony in North America. The trading settlement on the island of Manhattan was renamed New York in honour of the Duke of York, its new governor.

1848 - The United States paid Mexico $15 million for lands that eventually became Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas.

1899 – The Australian Premiers' Conference held in Melbourne decides to locate Australia's capital city, Canberra, between Sydney and Melbourne.

1901 - The state funeral of Queen Victoria. Her reign of 63 years and 7 months is longer than that of any other British monarch and the longest of any female monarch in history.

1943 - The last German troops in Stalingrad surrendered to the Red Army, ending one of the pivotal battles of World War II.

1972 - Angry demonstrators burned the British Embassy in Dublin to the ground in protest at the shooting dead of 13 people in Londonderry on the previous Sunday, known as Bloody Sunday.

1976 - The Queen opened the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham. It is the largest and busiest exhibition centre in the UK and the seventh largest in Europe.

1989 – Soviet war in Afghanistan: The last Soviet armoured column leaves Kabul.

1990 – Apartheid: F.W. de Klerk allows the African National Congress to function legally and promises to release Nelson Mandela.

2004 – Swiss tennis player Roger Federer becomes the No. 1 ranked men's singles player, a position he will hold for a record 237 weeks.

2006 - An aging Egyptian passenger ferry carrying more than 1,400 people sinks in the Red Sea off the Saudi coast.

(02-02-2012 13:51 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]1665 - British forces captured New Amsterdam, the centre of the Dutch colony in North America. The trading settlement on the island of Manhattan was renamed New York in honour of the Duke of York, its new governor.

There have been some strange trades and deals over the years, but swapping New York City for a supply of nutmeg must win the prize.

On August 27, 1664, while England and the Dutch Republic were at peace, four English frigates sailed into New Amsterdam's harbor and demanded New Netherland's surrender, whereupon New Netherland was provisionally ceded by director-general Peter Stuyvesant. This resulted in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, between England and the Dutch Republic. In June 1665, New Amsterdam was reincorporated under English law as New York City, named after the Duke of York (later King James II). He was brother of the English King Charles II, who had been granted the lands.

In 1667 the Treaty of Breda ended the conflict. The Dutch did not press their claims on New Netherland. In return, they were granted the tiny Island of Run in North Maluku, rich in nutmegs and the guarantee for the factual possession of Suriname, that year captured by them.

In July 1673, During the Third Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch occupied New York City and renamed it New Orange. Anthony Colve was installed as the first Governor. Previously there had only been West India Company Directors. After the signing of the Treaty of Westminster in November 1674, the city was relinquished to the English and the name reverted to "New York". Suriname became an official Dutch possession in return.

1690 – The colony of Massachusetts issues the first paper money in America.

1783 - Spain recognized United States' independence.

1917 - The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, which had announced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

1918 – The Twin Peaks Tunnel in San Francisco, California begins service as the longest streetcar tunnel in the world at 11,920 feet (3,633 meters) long.

1945 – World War II: As part of Operation Thunderclap, 1,000 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force bomb Berlin, a raid which kills between 2,500 to 3,000 and dehouses another 120,000.

1953 - French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau published "The Silent World."

1954 - The Queen visited Australia, the first reigning monarch to do so.

1961 – The United States Air Forces begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a "Doomsday Plane" is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States' bombers and missiles in the event of the destruction of the SAC's command post.

1963 - Britain's worst learner driver, Margaret Hunter, was fined for continuing to drive on after her instructor jumped out of the car shouting 'This is suicide.'

1966 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.

1971 – New York Police Officer Frank Serpico is shot during a drug bust in Brooklyn and survives to later testify against police corruption. Many believe the incident proves that NYPD officers tried to kill him.

1989 - BT banned chatlines because of the 'chatline junkie problem'. The company had been criticised following the widely reported case of a woman whose 12 year old son landed her a chatline bill of £6000.

1994 - The space shuttle Discovery blasted off with a woman, Air Force Lt. Col. Eileen Collins, in the pilot's seat for the first time.

2003 - Record producer Phil Spector was arrested for murder after the body of 40-year-old actress Lana Clarkson was found at his faux-castle mansion in Alhambra, California.

1959: Buddy Holly killed in air crash
Three young rock 'n' roll stars have been killed in a plane crash in the United States.
Buddy Holly, 22, Jiles P Richardson - known as the Big Bopper - 28, and Ritchie Valens, 17, died in a crash shortly after take-off from Clear Lake, Iowa at 0100 local time.

The pilot of the single-engined Beechcraft Bonanza plane was also killed.

Early reports from the scene suggest the aircraft spun out of control during a light snowstorm.

Only the pilot's body was found inside the wreckage as the performers were thrown clear on impact.

Holly hired the plane after heating problems developed on his tourbus.

All three were travelling to Moorhead, Minnesota, the next venue in their Winter Dance Party Tour

Holly had set up the gruelling schedule of concerts - covering 24 cities in three weeks - to make money after the break-up of his band, The Crickets, last year.

Recorded life

Born Charles Hardin Holley - changed to Holly after a misspelling on a contract - he had several hit records, including a number one, in the US and UK with That'll be the Day in 1957.

A singer and guitarist, he was inspired by Elvis Presley after seeing him at an early concert in his home town of Lubbock, Texas.

With Presley serving in the Army, some critics expected Holly to take over his crown.

Richard Valenzuela was the first Mexican American to break into mainstream music, after being discovered by record producer Bob Keane, who changed his name to Ritchie Valens.

He had made three albums and achieved a number two chart position in the US with his composition Donna - about his girlfriend - in 1958.

His rock 'n' roll re-working of the traditional Mexican song La Bamba - on the B-side of Donna - has also received acclaim.

The Big Bopper had been a record-breaking radio DJ - with a 122-hour marathon stint - and reached number six in the American charts with his record Chantilly Lace.

Your Memories?
Write your account of the events.


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Holly was taking his career in a new direction, as a soloist, when he was killed



In Context
Buddy Holly and, to a lesser extent, Ritchie Valens became musical legends.
Don McLean immortalised the tragedy with his 1972 hit American Pie.

Holly is often described as the most influential of the early rock 'n' roll musicians, and has been cited as such by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles.

His producer Norman Petty released demo tracks Holly recorded before his death.

Various re-workings and compilation albums have appeared in the years since.

Holly was commemorated in the musical Buddy which opened in London in 1986.

Mexican American group Los Lobos achieved a hit with La Bamba when they collaborated on the 1987 film of the same name, a biography of Ritchie Valens.


Stories From 3 Feb
1959: Buddy Holly killed in air crash
1960: Macmillan speaks of 'wind of change' in Africa
1986: Pope and Mother Teresa feed the sick
1998: Military jet causes cable car tragedy
1966: Soviets land probe on Moon
1988: Nurses protest for better pay
1978: Sadat in US for Mid East talks





http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witne...235875.stm

1789 - Electors unanimously chose George Washington to be the first President of the United States.

1794 – The French legislature abolishes slavery throughout all territories of the French Republic.

1859 – The Codex Sinaiticus is discovered in Egypt.

1911 - Rolls-Royce commissioned their famous figurehead ‘The Spirit of Ecstasy’ by Charles Sykes. He used Lord Montague’s mistress, Eleanor Thornton, as his model.

1936 – Radium becomes the first radioactive element to be made synthetically.

1945 – World War II: The Yalta Conference between the "Big Three" (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) opens at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.

1968 - The world's largest hovercraft, weighing 165 tonnes, was launched at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

1976 - More than 22,000 people died when a severe earthquake struck Guatemala and Honduras.

1997 - A civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

1998 – An earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter Scale in northeast Afghanistan kills more than 5,000.

2000 – German extortionist Klaus-Peter Sabotta is jailed for life for attempted murder and extortion in connection with the sabotage of German railway lines.

2002 – Cancer Research UK, the world's largest independent cancer research charity, is founded.

2003 - Lawmakers formally dissolved Yugoslavia and replaced it with a union of its remaining two republics, Serbia and Montenegro.

2004 – Facebook, a mainstream online social network is launched by Mark Zuckerberg.