3 February 2025 (MIA)

1830 – The London Protocol of 1830 establishes the full independence and sovereignty of Greece from the Ottoman Empire as the final result of the Greek War of Independence.

1870 – The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing voting rights to male citizens regardless of race.

1916 – The Centre Block of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada burns down with the loss of 7 lives.

1917 – World War I: The United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany two days after the latter announced a new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

1931 – The Hawke’s Bay earthquake, New Zealand’s worst natural disaster, kills 258.

1933 – Adolf Hitler announces that the expansion of Lebensraum into Eastern Europe, and its ruthless Germanisation, are the ultimate geopolitical objectives of Third Reich foreign policy.

1945 – World War II: As part of Operation Thunderclap, 1,000 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force bomb Berlin, a raid which kills between 2,500 and 3,000 and dehouses another 120,000.

1953 – The Batepá massacre occurred in São Tomé when the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners unleashed a wave of violence against the native creoles known as forros.

1958 – Founding of the Benelux Economic Union, creating a testing ground for a later European Economic Community.

1959 – Rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

1960 – British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks of “a wind of change”, signalling that his Government was likely to support decolonisation.

1966 – The Soviet Union’s Luna 9 becomes the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon, and the first spacecraft to take pictures from the surface of the Moon.

1977 – Vasko Karangeleski, a prominent Macedonian Colonel General in the Yugoslavian National Army who was proclaimed a national hero, dies in freak accident. He was born in 1921.

1984 – John Buster and the research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announce history’s first embryo transfer, from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.

1987 – Professor Vladimir Moshin, an academic who dedicated his work to researching Macedonian medieval art and culture, dies in Skopje. He was born in Petrograd in 1894.

1989 – A military coup overthrows Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay since 1954.

1994 – Space Shuttle program: STS-60 is launched, carrying Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian cosmonaut to fly aboard the Shuttle

1995 – Astronaut Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle as mission STS-63 gets underway from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

1998 – Cavalese cable car disaster: a United States military pilot causes the death of 20 people when his low-flying plane cuts the cable of a cable-car near Trento, Italy.

2007 – A Baghdad market bombing kills at least 135 people and injures a further 339.

2014 – Two people are shot and killed and 29 students are taken hostage at a high school in Moscow, Russia.