1979: In response to Islamist militant followers of Ayatollah Khomeini holding American hostages in Tehran, U.S. President Jimmy Carter suspends oil imports from Iran. It’s a symbolic move, however, as less than 4 percent of American oil imports originate in Iran—and Carter was not ending grain exports to Iran. Khomeini, in a speech, derides Carter as “an enemy to humanity” and tells Iranian, without noting that American grain exports were continuing, “We know how to fast. We will eat the wheat and barley we grow in our own country. We eat meat once a week. Eating meat is not such a good thing anyway.”
1979: In Beirut, Lebanon, Iranian students storm the grounds of the American Embassy, lower the flag and burn it before being dispersed by Syrian troops then occupying most of Lebanon.
1984: The Reagan administration announces it is ready to re-establish diplomatic relations with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after a 17-year interruption. Iraq severed relations in 1967 following Israel’s Six Day War with Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Between 1982 and 1984, the Reagan administration had extended $1.6 billion in agricultural credits.
1984: The trial of Israel’s Ariel Sharon’s $50 million libel suit against Time Inc. opens in Manhattan. Sharon, Israel’s minister of industry and commerce at the time, charges that Time magazine libeled him in a 1983 article that suggested he condoned and encouraged the 1982 massacre, by Christian Phalangist militias under the protection of the Israeli military, of Palestinian civilians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon lost the case (Time was found guilty of defamation and falsity but not of actual malice).
1996: A Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747, taking off from New Delhi airport at 6:40 p.m. local time, collides with a Kazakh Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane. All 349 passengers and crew aboard the two planes are killed.
1997: Four Americans and their Pakistani driver are gunned down in Karachi, Pakistan. The Americans were in Karachi, auditing the books of the oil company they worked for, Houston-based Union Texas Petroleum. Rush-hour traffic ogles the victims for 40 minutes before they’re taken to Aga Khan Hospital five miles away. The attack may have been retaliation for the conviction by a Fairfax, Va., jury two days earlier of a Pakistani, Mir Amal Kansi, on charges of murdering two CIA employees and wounding three others outside the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., in a 1993 shooting. The Americans murdered iN Karachi were: Ephrahim C. Egbu, 42; Joel B. Enlow, 40; William L. Jennings, 49; and Tracy L. Ritchie, 41, all from Houston. The Pakistani driver was Anwar Mirza, 51, of Karachi.
1997: After three days of deliberations, a federal jury in Manhattan convicts Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Kuwaiti of Pakistani descent, of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which caused six deaths and hundreds of injuries. The jury also convicts Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian national, driver of the Ryder van that carried the bomb into the Trade Center’s underground garage. Four lower-level conspirators had been convicted three years earlier. Both are serving life terms without parole. Yousef is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
1997: The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopts Resolution 1137 imposing new travel restrictions on Iraqi officials who don’t cooperate with the UN’s disarmament commission, and condemning Iraq for threatening to shoot down U-2 surveillance planes, blocking UN inspectors from entering suspected military sites and hiding equipment.
2000: Leah Rabin, wife of Israeli Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, dies at age 72. She was born in 1928.
2001: The Taliban abandon Kabul, the Afghan capital, as 10,000 to 12,000 troops in packs of 500 march on the capital. The troops are mostly Northern Alliance and Pashtun.
2002 Israeli foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to a Likud Party convention, pledges that if he is elected prime minister, he would immediately expel Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, from his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Arafat has been under Israeli siege for months.
2004: Yasser Arafat’s funeral is held in Cairo.
2008: Algeria's parliament approves constitutional amendments that abolish presidential term limits, until thens et at two five-year terms. Legislators' 500-21 vote in the largely undemocratic bicameral legislature was a thinly veiled constitutional coup by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a strongman favored by the military who was nearing the end of his second term (presidential elections were scheduled for April 2009).
