* British archaeologist Howard CARTER (1873-1939), who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, died 65 years ago.
* US bomber Lucky Lady II performed the first nonstop round-the-world 94-hour flight 55 years ago, in 1949.
* The accident in Damansky Island (the Ussuri River) occurred near Nizhne-Mikhailovka border checkpoint 35 years ago, in 1969. Thirty Chinese servicemen crossed the Soviet-Chinese border and shot a group of Soviet border guards. They were also attacked from a Chinese ambush on the island. All in all, 30 Soviet people were killed and 14 wounded.
* The first test flight of the British-French supersonic passenger liner Concord (pilot Andrei Turcat) took place 35 years ago, in 1969.
* Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan became independent UN members 12 years ago, in 1992.
IN RUSSIA:
85 years ago, on March 2 to 6, 1919 Moscow hosted the 1st (constitutive) congress of the Communist International, which existed till May 15, 1943.
Konstantin USHINSKY (1824-1871), the founder of Russian pedagogy, was born 180 years ago.
Jewish writer SHOLOM-ALEIKHEM (Sholom Rabinovich, 1859-1916) was born 145 years ago. He died in the USA.
Count Dmitry BLUDOV (1785-1864), statesman, writer and diplomat, died 140 years ago.
Soviet academician, biochemist Alexander OPARIN (1894-1980), the author of a hypothesis of the beginning of life on the Earth and a co-founder and director of the Biochemistry Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was born 110 years ago.
Mikhail GORBACHEV, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, was born 73 years ago, in 1931. Today he is the leader of Russia's Social-democratic Party, the president of the Gorbachev-fund of social-economic and political research and of the Green Cross international ecological organization.
Fashion designer Vyacheslav ZAITSEV, the director of the Moscow fashion House, was born 66 years ago, in 1938.
The plenum of the KPSS (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) Central Committee issued a decree "On the further increase of grain production in the country and the developing of virgin and fallow lands" 50 years ago, in 1954.
