May 17 1900 - Boer War: Relief of Mafeking
After 216 days Boer forces abandoned the siege and Colonel Mahon's relief column entered the town.
May 17 1941 - World War II: North Africa
Rommel was instructed by Berlin to leave Torbruk to the Italians and concentrate his Deutsches Afrika Korps on the fight along the Egypt-Libya border.
May 17 1956
Nationalist China broke off relation with Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser granted diplomatic recognition to Communist China.
British Queen Mother started the hydro-electric turbines of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi. She applauds the "young and enterprising" Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
May 17 1964
President Ahmed Ben Bella, of the republic of Algeria, returned home after a 25-day diplomatic tour to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
May 17 1970
Thor Heyerdahl set sail from Morocco for Latin America on a papyrus boat, Ra II, to prove his theories that ancient Egyptians made similar voyages 4,000 years ago.
May 17 1978
South African police closed the investigation into the death of Steve Biko.
May 17 1989
A military coup failed to remove Mengistu Haile Mariam as president of Ethiopia.
May 17 1991
The UN's High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) predicted that 1,200,000 people in Ethiopia are about to starve to death.
May 17 1993
Egyptian president Muhammad Hosni Mubarak ordered direct-dial communications to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the Sudan cut as part of the fight against Islamic extremists.
May 17 2005: Toyota announced plans for hybrid Camry
On this day in 2005, Toyota Motor Company announced its plans to produce a gasoline-electric hybrid version of its bestselling Camry sedan. Built at the company’s Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, the Camry became Toyota’s first hybrid model to be manufactured in the United States.
Toyota introduced the Camry–the name is a phonetic transcription of the Japanese word for “crown”–in the Japanese market in 1980; it began selling in the United States the following year. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the success of the Camry and its Japanese competitor, the Honda Accord, had allowed Toyota and Honda to seize control of the midsize sedan market in the United States. By then, Toyota had adapted the Camry more to American tastes, increasing its size and replacing its original boxy design with a smoother, more rounded style. By 2003, as Micheline Maynard recorded in her book “The End of Detroit,” apart from the early-’90s success of the Ford Taurus, the Camry and Accord had long maintained their position atop the list of the nation’s best-selling cars overall, each selling around 400,000 units per year.
In 1997, Toyota’s Prius–the world’s first mass-produced gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle–went on sale in Japan. It was released worldwide in 2001. By using an electric motor to supplement power from the gasoline, hybrid technology resulted in greatly improved fuel efficiency and higher gas mileage. Honda launched its own hybrid lineup with the Insight in 1999 and continued with the hybrid Civic in 2002. By then, skyrocketing gas prices had combined with a backlash against gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (SUVs) to make hybrids suddenly chic. Eco-conscious Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz proudly drove their Priuses around Los Angeles, and by 2003 Honda and Toyota were selling 50,000 hybrids a year in the United States. The plans to develop a hybrid Camry, announced in May 2005, brought the total number of Toyota-made hybrid models to four, including the Prius; the Lexus RX 400h, a midsize sport utility vehicle (SUV) released in April 2005; and a second SUV, the Toyota Highlander, released that June.
Source: history.com, africanhistory.about.com
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