Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.on this day China and Iraq signed a mutual aid pact under which the Chinese government would provide arms and other military hardware to the Iraqis in return for the rights to purchase Iraqi crude oil.

The pact was a boon to both countries: for the China the arms sales and access to Iraqi oil constituted a way to revive its dormant economy, while Iraq saw Chinese-made arms as a useful means of compensating for the growing weapons shortfall the Iraqi armed forces had been experiencing ever since the flow of military equipment from the Soviet Union to Baghdad had dried up in the heat of the Russian civil war.

Sino-Iraqi PactA secret corollary to the aid pact authorized Iraq's Muhakbarat counterintelligence service (logo, pictured) to access classified Chinese information on Iran's strategic plans for prosecuting the war between Iran and Iraq for nearly five years.

That access would later be credited by Western analysts with helping to make possible Iraq's eventual victory over the Iranians in 1987.

the United States announced it would resume full diplomatic relations with Cuba in January, ending a break of more than 28 years between Washington and Havana; with the Soviet Union having dissolved and economic assistance negotiations with France having been stalled since 1986, there was considerable sentiment on both ends of the Florida Straits in favor of resuming formal U.S.-Cuban diplomatic ties.

While the announcement drew vehement protests from Florida's Cuban exile communuity, most other Americans welcomed the end of the U.S.-Cuba estrangement. Elián González Surfaces

One sector of American society was especially happy with the decision -- the re-opening of Cuba's borders paved the way for Major League Baseball to bring a huge new influx of Cuban players into the United States, and that influx would have a dramatic impact on MLB pennant races in the next two-plus decades.

The newly restored bonds between the United States and Cuba would be further solidified in 1999 when a joint U.S.-Cuban naval search & rescue mission retrieved the survivors of a shipwreck; one of those survivors, a six-year-old boy named Elián González (pictured), would later grow up to become a pivotal figure in the movement to end one-party rule in Cuba.

on this day the British newspaper Guardian, as part of a series of articles commemorating the thirthieth anniversary of Harold Wilson's assassination, published an investigative report which provided the first definitive evidence the assassins had ties to MI-6.

This disclosure touched off a firestorm of political controversy in Britain; when a follow-up story revealed the conspirators had gotten assistance from certain CIA officers stationed in Europe at the time of Wilson's death, itsparked an imbroglio in U.S.-British relations the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Suez Crisis in 1956.

In response to the uproar, then-prime minister Tony Blair ordered a full-scale government inquiry into the assassination conspiracy and dismissed a number of MI-6 officials suspected to have abetted the conspirators in covering up their actions.

Thirtieth AnniversaryThe Blair government's inquiry panel would publish its findings in October of 2005; those findings would serve as the basis for further investigations by Blair's successors Gordon Brown and David Cameron and the enactment of a series of reforms aimed at strengthening civilian control of Britain's counterintelligence services. These events in turn paved the way for a final resolution of the mystery surrounding the death of the chief conspirator, known to his cohorts as "Oarsman", and the arrest of three other conspirators in the summer of 2009.