The Liberal-Social Democratic alliance crushingly defeated both the Labour Party and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in a special parliamentary election marked by mud-slinging. The centrist alliance, which has pledged to break the 60-year Tory-Labour hold on British politics, swept to victory by defeating second-placed Labour, which had held southeast London’s Greenwich seat continuously since 1945. The Conservatives trailed far behind in third place. With its victory at Greenwich, the alliance now has 27 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons. Alliance candidate Rosie Barnes (above) won 18,287 votes or 53 per cent of the vote against 11,676 votes or 33.8 per cent polled by Labour’s Deirdre Wood.
Other important events:
1617 Sweden and Russia sign the Treaty of Stolbovo, a peace treaty which officially ended the Ingrian War.
1861 Russian troops fire on a crowd in Warsaw that was protesting Russian rule over Poland.
1889 Burma opens railroad from Rangoon to Mandalay.
1933 The German Reichstag (parliament) in Berlin is destroyed by fire.
1939 Britain and France recognise General Francisco Franco’s government in Spain.
1967 Dominica gains independence from England.
1974 Ethiopia’s Cabinet resigns as military mutiny spreads from captured city of Asmara.
1982 Wayne B. Williams is found guilty of murdering two of the 28 young blacks.
1987 Donald Regan is replaced by Howard Baker Jr as White House chief of staff.
1990 Toshiki Kaifu wins re-election as Japan’s Prime Minister
1993 Dubai’s first-ever floodlit horse races held at Dubai Racing Club in Nad Al Sheba.
1994 A bomb explodes in a packed Maronite Catholic church in Lebanon, killing nine worshippers.
1997 A car bomb explodes outside a police station in the violence-plagued town of Apartado, Colombia, killing at least seven people and injuring 43.
1998 The US lifts a 35-year-old arms embargo against South Africa.
1999 Nigeria elects General Olusegun Obasanjo in the first presidential elections after 15 years of military rule.
2001 A mob of native Dayak fighters in Indonesia attack and massacre at least 118 migrants travelling under police escort.
2002 Fifty-nine people are burnt alive and 43 injured when a train catches a fire at Godhra rail station in India.
2004 Overcrowded ferry catches fire in Philippines and killing at least 139 people.
2005 Iran and Russia sign a nuclear fuel agreement.
2006 Security forces in Saudi Arabia kill five militants sought in an attempt to detonate car bombs in a huge oil complex.
2008 Masked thieves drill a tunnel into the Damiani showroom in Milan, Italy, making off with gold, diamonds and rubies worth an estimated $20 million (Dh73.56 million).
2012 Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi becomes president of Yemen.
2013 An Iraqi Airways flight lands in Kuwait for the first time since Iraq’s invasion in 1990.
2015 Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov is shot dead in central Moscow.
2016 Stan Wawrinka wins the Dubai Tennis Championship.
