Reuters North American News Service, December 28th, 2007
Dec 28 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major
events to have occurred on January 4 since 1900:
1908 - Mulai Hafid was proclaimed Sultan of Morocco at Fez.
1923 - Dying Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin dictated a
postscript to a letter that has become known as his political
"testament" in which he suggested Stalin was too rude to be
general secretary of the Communist party and should be replaced.
1948 - The British governor of Burma formerly handed over
power and the Union of Burma was proclaimed an independent
republic with U Thakin Nu as its first prime minister.
1958 - Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite
launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union, disintegrated and
fell to earth.
1960 - Albert Camus, Algerian-born French existentialist
writer, died in a car accident. His work included the novels
"L'Etranger" (The Outsider) and "La Peste" (The Plague).
1964 - Pope Paul VI began a visit to the Holy Land, which
included the first visit by a pope to Jerusalem.
1965 - T.S. Eliot, American-born English poet, playwright
and Nobel Prize winner, died. He wrote "The Waste Land", "Murder
in the Cathedral", and "Four Quartets".
1967 - Donald Campbell, British car and speedboat racer, was
killed on Coniston Water in England during an attempt to break
the world water speed record.
1978 - Said Hammami, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's
representative in Britain, was assassinated in London.
1995 - Newt Gingrich was formally elected speaker of the
U.S. House of Representatives, the first Republican in the post
in 40 years.
2000 - Former Ivory Coast President Henri Konan Bedie
arrived in Paris to take up residence after being overthrown in
a Christmas Eve coup.
2002 - The world's oldest man, 112-year-old Antonio Todde
who swore the secret of his longevity was a daily glass of red
wine, died on the Italian island of Sardinia. In a bizarre twist
of fate, Italy's oldest woman, 110-year-old Maria Grazia
Broccolo, died only hours later in a small town south of Rome.
2004 - Rival Afghan factions attending the Loya Jirga agreed
on a national constitution, paving the way for the first free
elections after nearly a quarter-century of war.
2007 - Nancy Pelosi, a liberal California Democrat, was
sworn in as the first woman speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives.
