1997 Millions of Algerians voted in the country’s first local elections in seven years, but few expected the poll to end the bloodshed that racks the North African nation. The voting passed with no major security incidents, but witnesses said sporadic clashes continued in Bainam forest on the outskirts of Algiers where security forces maintained a siege in a week-old campaign to flush out rebels hiding there. All polling stations were closed at 7pm GMT after the interior minister extended voting by one hour in 11 of the country’s 48 provinces, including the capital Algiers. Stations in the other provinces closed as scheduled an hour earlier after 11 hours of voting. The Interior Ministry said 56 per cent of the nearly 16 million eligible voters had cast their ballots. Turnout was lowest in Algiers, where recent massacres of hundreds of civilians on its outskirts were blamed by authorities on rebels.
Other important events
1764 British forces defeat Nawab of Oudh at Buxar, Bengal.
1910 Blanche Stuart Scott becomes first woman to fly solo in a public aircraft flight.
1915 British cricketer W. G. Grace dies.
1944 Soviet army invades Hungary.
1953 Federal Constitution of Rhodesia and Nyasaland goes into effect.
1954 Britain, France, US and Soviet Union agree to end occupation of Germany.
1956 The first use of videotape on a US network television show.
1975 Britain scraps foreign exchange controls, opening the way for investors to send their money overseas.
1980 Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin resigns due to ill health.
1983 243 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers are killed in suicide attacks in Beirut, Lebanon.
1985 Emirates airline is formally launched in Dubai.
1989 Hungary is officially proclaimed a free republic following the end of communist rule.
1993 An IRA bomb explodes on a crowded shopping street in Belfast, killing 10 people.
1994 Sri Lankan leader Gamini Dissanayake is assassinated in a bomb blast in Colombo.
1996 Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland stuns Norway by resigning unexpectedly.
1998 A Palestinian-Israeli interim peace accord is signed at the White House.
2001 Apple Computer releases the first iPod digital music player.
2002 About 40 Chechen guerrillas armed with guns and grenades hold hundreds of Moscow theatre-goers hostage.
2003 Madame Chiang Kai-shek, widow of the Chinese nationalist leader, dies in New York at age 105.
2004 A suicide car bomb explodes near a US marine base in western Iraq, killing 16 Iraqi policemen.
2006 Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling is sentenced by a federal judge in Houston to 24 years, four months for his role in the company’s collapse.
2010 American swimmer Francis Crippen dies due to intense exertion at the 2010 Fina 10km Marathon Swimming World Cup held in Fujairah open waters.
2011 A 7.2-magnitude earthquake strikes eastern Turkey, killing more than 200 people.
2013 China and India sign an agreement to boost meetings between their militaries.
2014 A bomb blast at a bus station in Azare, Nigeria, killing five people.
2015 At least 42 people are killed when a coach carrying pensioners collide with a lorry and burst into flames in southwest France.
