ON THIS DAY- On this day in 1995, the Dayton Accord, a peace settlement for war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina was brokered in the US. The agreement was signed by the presidents of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia on 14 December 1995. “Under the agreement Bosnia will remain a single state, but most power will be devolved to two new territories – a Muslim-Croat federation and a Bosnian-Serb republic,” BBC reported at the time. In 1979, a mob in Islamabad burned the US Embassy in Pakistan to the ground. On this day in 1783, the first manned hot-air balloon flight was made by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, marquis d’Arlandes, traveling from the Château de la Muette across the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris in a balloon made by Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. Thomas Edison announced the invention of the phonograph as a device for recording and replaying sound in 1877. French philosopher and author Voltaire was born on this day in 1694. More recently, Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte was born in 1898. This time last year we were reporting on news that the government could be planning to axe two mn bureaucrats by 2020.