Taylor is Liberia’s President
1997 - Former warlord Charles Taylor won a landslide victory in Liberia’s presidential election, according to results announced, achieving through the ballot box what he had failed to get through the barrel of a gun. Thousands of Liberians thronged the streets and cheered as election commission chairman Henry Andrews announced that Taylor, who launched Liberia’s civil war in 1989, had won election with 75.3 per cent of the vote. Taylor, 49, wearing his trademark cream safari suit and smiling broadly, was in the hall to hear the result. Former senior United Nations official Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was runner-up with just under 9.6 per cent, Andrews told a packed hall in Monrovia, capital of the West African republic. Twelve candidates took part in the vote.
Other important events:
1866 Tennessee becomes the first US state to rejoin the Union following the American Civil War.
1911 Yale University professor Hiram Bingham discovers Machu Picchu in Peru.
1922 League of Nations Council approves mandates for Palestine and Egypt.
1933 The first successful lung removal operation is performed by Dr W.F. Reinhoff Jr in Baltimore, Maryland
1946 US makes first underwater test of an atomic bomb off Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
1963 Victor Marijnen becomes Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
1969 The US Apollo 11 astronauts, the first men to walk on the Moon, splash down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1973 Four men from the Japanese Red Army hijack a Japan Airlines plane. They release the 137 occupants, then blow it up and are arrested in Libya.
1974 Konstantinos Karamanlis returns from exile and is sworn in as prime minister of Greece.
1976 US spacecraft Viking 1 lands on Mars and starts tests to determine whether life exists on the planet.
1981 Israel and the PLO endorse truce deals to end fighting along the Lebanese-Israeli border.
1994 Rwandan refugees trickle into Zaire after the border is opened.
1996 Two powerful bombs rip through a packed train near the Sri Lankan capital killing 70 people.
1997 Scotland to get its first parliament for almost 300 years under sweeping decentralisation plans unveiled by the British government.
1998 Foreign Minister Keizo Obuchi is elected Japan’s Prime Minister.
2001 Tamil rebels attack Colombo international airport and the adjoining air base, destroying 13 aircrafts and leaving 20 people dead.
2002 Nine coal miners in southwestern Pennsylvania are rescued after more than three days trapped 240 feet below the surface.
2005 Lance Armstrong retires after winning his seventh consecutive Tour de France.
2010 Nineteen people are killed and hundreds injured in a stampede at the Love Parade music festival in Duisburg, Germany.
2013 Gunmen attacks a complex housing Pakistani security agencies in the southern town of Sukkur, killing five people.
2014 All 116 people are killed in Air Algerie after the plane crashes in northern Mali.
2016 Britain’s Chris Froome of Team Sky wins his third Tour de France title.
