Feb 17 - when the Berlin Wall was torn down

On this day in

Today is Thursday, February 17, the forty eighth day of 2005.
There are 317 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1568 - Turkey's Sultan Selim II makes peace with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II.
1801 - U.S. House of Representatives breaks an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president.
1817 - A street in Baltimore becomes the first to be lighted with gas from America's first gas company.
1852 - Repressive measures are adopted in France, including press censorship in the aftermath of overthrow of the constitutional monarchy.

1904 - Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly" is poorly received during its world premiere at La Scala.
1916 - British and French forces complete capture of Germany's African colony of Cameroon during World War I.
1944 - U.S. forces attack Japanese at Eniwetok Atoll in Pacific in World War II.
1965 - U.S. spacecraft Ranger 8 is launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida, and crashes on the Moon three days later after sending back more than 7,000 pictures.
1972 - U.S. President Richard Nixon departs on his historic trip to China.
1990 - East Germany announces it will tear down a 180-metre section of the Berlin Wall near Brandenburg Gate, which will be first section with no official controls.
1991 - Amid the Gulf War, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz arrives in Moscow for talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
1992 - U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali recommends deployment of 13,000 peacekeepers in Yugoslavia.
1993 - In a controversial move, the United Nations suspends most of its relief convoys in Bosnia, criticizing all sides in the conflict for not letting convoys through. The convoys are resumed a week later.
1994 - Serb guns pull back from positions around Sarajevo, Bosnia, ahead of a NATO deadline.
1995 - Peru and Ecuador sign a peace treaty, ending a five-week border war that killed 78.
1996 - A magnitude-7 quake strikes eastern Indonesia, killing at least 53; world chess champion Garry Kasparov beats IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game match in Philadelphia.

2000 - A judge upholds the conviction of a man who cursed in front of children after falling out of a canoe, ruling that Michigan's 102-year-old anti-swearing law is constitutional.
2001 - A bomb attack on a bus kills seven Serbs and injures dozens in northern Kosovo.
2002 - Maoist rebels kill 137 people in raids on a town and an airport in the northwest of Nepal. The attacks are the worst since November 2001, when the rebels broke a peace agreement and the government declared a state of emergency.
2003 - Twenty-one people are crushed to death and some 50 others are injured when a panic-stricken crowd try to exit a nightclub in Chicago.

Today's Birthdays:
Thomas Robert Malthus, English economist (1766-1834)
AJ "Banjo" Paterson, Australian poet (1864-1941)
Andre Maginot, French military expert (1877-1932)
Gene Pitney, U.S. singer (1941--)
Billie Joe Armstrong, U.S. singer/guitarist (1972--)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, U.S. actor (1981--)

HT Image