Mahmoud Abbas, who was a founder of Fatah in the 1950s and had served briefly as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2003 under Y─sir ?Araf─t, was elected president of the PA on this day in 2005.
| 2001: | | Australian scientists said that analysis of DNA taken from 60,000-year-old local human remains showed no links with human ancestors from Africa, suggesting that Africa was not the only site of the genesis of the human species. |
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| 1908: | | | Simone de Beauvoir, French writer and feminist who gave a literary transcription to the themes of existentialism, was born in Paris. |
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| 1861: | | | Mississippi became the second U.S. state (after South Carolina) to secede from the Union, in the run-up to the American Civil War. |
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| 1839: | | | Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre of France proclaimed his invention of the daguerreotype, the first commercially successful form of photography. |
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