Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 11:
1919 – Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie died at 83.
1952 – King Hussein of Jordan took the throne after his father, King Talal, was declared unfit to rule because of mental illness.
1956 – U.S. painter Jackson Pollock, leader of the abstract expressionist movement, was killed in a car accident. He introduced the technique of pouring paint onto canvas.
1966 – A treaty to end three years of hostilities between Malaysia and Indonesia was signed in Jakarta.
1994 – Russia’s Supreme Court acquitted General Valentin Varennikov of high treason for joining those trying to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in an August 1991 coup attempt.
1998 – British Petroleum stunned markets by announcing it had agreed to merge with Amoco of the United States in a $110 billion deal.
2000 – The Bank of Japan raised interest rates for the first time in 10 years, rejecting an unprecedented request from the government for a delay.
2002 – Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh voted for a new leader, defying the world community and brushing off angry protests from Baku. Arkady Gukasyan resoundingly won a new five-year term.
2002 – US Airways Group Inc., the sixth-largest U.S. airline, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, in the first bankruptcy filing by a major air carrier since the Sept. 11 attacks.
2003 – In Afghanistan, NATO took command of Kabul’s peacekeeping force, its first operation outside Europe.
2005 – Europe’s Ariane-5 rocket launched the world’s largest communications satellite, placing the 6.5-tonne iPSTAR in orbit for Thailand’s Shin Satellite.
(Reuters)
