Reuters North American News Service, January 24th, 2008
Jan 24 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major
events to have occurred on January 31 since 1900:
1943 - German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered to
the Russians at Stalingrad in World War Two.
1956 - A.A. Milne, author of the "Winnie the Pooh" stories,
died.
1958 - The first U.S. earth satellite, Explorer I, was
launched at Cape Canaveral.
1971 - Limited telephone service was restored between East
and West Berlin for the first time in 19 years.
1974 - Samuel Goldwyn, U.S. film producer and co-founder of
Metro Goldwyn Mayer, died. "The Best Years of Our Lives" and
"Wuthering Heights" were among his productions.
1992 - Trans World Airlines (TWA) filed for bankruptcy
protection.
1996 - Suicide truck bombers attacked Sri Lanka's central
bank in the heart of the capital, Colombo. At least 80 people
were killed.
2000 - An Alaska Airlines MD-83 carrying 88 people plunged
17,000 feet (5,180 metres) into the Pacific off southern
California. All aboard were killed.
2000 - Harold Shipman, a family doctor from northwest
England, was sentenced to life in jail for murdering 15 of his
mainly elderly patients with lethal injections of heroin.
2001 - Libyan former secret agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi
was jailed for life for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner
over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. His
co-accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, was cleared.
2002 - Ireland's Roman Catholic church agreed to pay 128
million euros ($110 million) in compensation to people abused
while in children's homes run by religious orders.
2004 - The NASA rover Opportunity drove down from its
landing pad and sent back pictures from the surface of planet
Mars, marking the first time that two mobile robots had
simultaneously explored another planet.
2004 - Pakistan fired Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of its
nuclear programme, as scientific adviser to the prime minister
amid a probe into the sale of nuclear technology.
2005 - A U.S. court upheld the constitutional rights of
Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspects and ruled that the military
tribunals set up to determine the status of each detainee were
unconstitutional.
2006 - Coretta Scott King, who came to the forefront of the
fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin
Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, died.
