15 février

Paschal II’s bull Pie postulatio voluntatis took the hospital of Saint John in Jerusalem, founded by merchants from Amalfi, under papal protection. It cared for sick pilgrims; its knights came decades later.

A slab carved in Nanjing in Chinese, Tamil and Persian records the same offerings of gold, silver and silk to the Buddha, a Hindu god and Allah in turn. It was found in 1911, face down as a culvert cover in Galle, and is now in the National Museum in Colombo.

General Percival surrendered to Yamashita in the Ford factory at Bukit Timah after a campaign of 70 days down the Malay peninsula. About 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops went into captivity; Churchill called it the worst disaster in British history.

British and American bombers raised a firestorm in the old city. A commission of historians appointed by the city reported in 2010 that up to 25,000 people died, far below the hundreds of thousands claimed by Nazi propaganda and repeated since.

Moscow sent its army in to save a communist government it did not trust. It stayed nine years against mujahideen armed by the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. About 15,000 Soviet soldiers died. Estimates of Afghan deaths run from about one million to two million, and some five million…

General Boris Gromov, the commander of the 40th Army, walked last across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya into Soviet Uzbekistan. He did not look back, he told reporters.

The public consortium published its draft in Nature and Celera its own in Science a day later. The surprise: only about 30,000 to 40,000 genes, far fewer than the 100,000 many had expected.