Today is Friday, February 17, the 48th day of 2006. There are 317 days left in the year.

from south africa news

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Highlights in history on 17 February:

1568 -       Turkey's Sultan Selim II makes peace with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II.

1801 -    US 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.

1838 -   Dingane orders his forces to wipe out a remaining party of Voortrekkers after the murder of Piet Retief and his companions, and at Bloukrans in Natal 41 men, 56 women and 97 children are massacred.

1852 -   Repressive measures are adopted in France, including press censorship in the aftermath of overthrow of the constitutional monarchy.

1897 -     Britain rejects Austro-Russian proposal for blockade of Piraeus in Greece;

Also in 1897 -   the forerunner of the US National PTA, the National Congress of Mothers, is founded in Washington, DC.

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 1.

1944 -     US forces attack Japanese at Eniwetok Atoll in Pacific in World War 2.

1947 -   The Voice of America begins its radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union.

1965 -    US 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 -       US President Richard Nixon departs on his historic trip to China.

1990 -   East Germany announces it will tear down a 180m 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.

Also in 1991 -   The Commonwealth Committee on Southern Africa decides to maintain sanctions until promises of reform in South Africa are carried out.

1992 -   Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is jailed for life in the US for murdering and dismembering 15 young men and boys.

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;

Also in 1996 -    world chess champion Garry Kasparov (Armenian/Jewish) beats IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game match in Philadelphia.

"Kasparov rose from a Chess table full of triumph and glory. He has just defeated IBM's "Deep Blue" super-computer in the six and final game of a head to head battle that was depicted as the ultimate test of man vs machine. The humans had won by a score of 4-2, but it wasn't even that close. Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest Chess champion of all time, had demonstrated a command of strategy far beyond the machine's crunching brute-force tactics. Deep Blue could assess 100 million positions persecond, but it lacked the sensitivity needed to grasp the subtlety of position play, the hallmark of true mastery."

1997 -   Former copper trader Yasuo Hamanaka pleads guilty in a Tokyo court to fraud and forgery in trying to cover speculation that depressed world copper markets and lost his company $2.6bn.

1998 -     American athletes compete in Iran for the first time since the 1979 revolution.

1999 - Three Kurds are shot and killed trying to enter the Israeli consulate in Berlin to protest what they believe was Israeli involvement in the arrest of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan by Turkey.

(Who are the Kurds? A largely Sunni Muslim people with their own language and culture, most Kurds live in the generally contiguous areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Syria �?a mountainous region of southwest Asia generally known as Kurdistan ("Land of the Kurds").  

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.

2004 -   More than 100 reformist lawmakers in a letter accuse Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of allowing freedoms to be "trampled" and rigging upcoming parliament elections in favor of hard-line backers. The Guardian Council disqualified more than 2,400 pro-reform candidates before the election.