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--)
