Reuters historical calendar - January 31

London, Jan 30 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 31 since 1900: 1943 - German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad in World War Two.

1956 - A A Milne, author of the ''Winnie the Pooh'' stories, died.

1958 - The first US earth satellite, Explorer I, was launched at Cape Canaveral.

1971 - Limited telephone service was restored between East and West Berlin for the first time in 19 years.

1974 - Samuel Goldwyn, US film producer and co-founder of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, died. ''The Best Years of Our Lives'' and ''Wuthering Heights'' were among his productions.

1992 - Trans World Airlines (TWA) filed for bankruptcy protection.

1996 - Suicide truck bombers attacked Sri Lanka's central bank in the heart of the capital, Colombo. At least 80 people were killed.

2000 - An Alaska Airlines MD-83 carrying 88 people plunged 17,000 feet into the Pacific off southern California. All aboard are killed.

2000 - Harold Shipman, a family doctor from northwest England, was sentenced to life in jail for murdering 15 of his mainly elderly patients with lethal injections of heroin.

2001 - Libyan former secret agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was jailed for life for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. His co-accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, was cleared.

2002 - Ireland's Roman Catholic church agreed to pay 128 million euros in compensation to people abused while in children's homes run by religious orders.

2004 - The NASA rover Opportunity drove down from its landing pad and sent back pictures from the surface of planet Mars, marking the first time that two mobile robots had simultaneously explored another planet.

2004 - Pakistan fired Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ''father'' of its nuclear programme, as scientific adviser to the prime minister amid a probe into the sale of nuclear technology.

2005 - A US court upheld the constitutional rights of Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspects and ruled that the military tribunals set up to determine the status of each detainee were unconstitutional.

**2006 - Coretta Scott King, who came to the forefront of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr was murdered in 1968, died.

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