Today is Monday, Dec. 14, the 348th day of 2015. There are 17 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1542 – Accession of Mary Queen of Scots following the death of King James V.
1799 – George Washington, the first president of the United States, dies at his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home at age 67.
1822 – Congress of Verona ends, ignoring Greek war of independence.
1877 – Serbia joins Russia in war on Turkey.
1911 – Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen becomes first man to reach South Pole.
1912 – Louis Botha resigns as South Africa’s premier.
1913 – Greece formally annexes Crete.
1916 – People of Denmark vote to sell Danish West Indies to United States for $25 million.
1918 – Sidonio Paes, president of Portugal, is assassinated.
1927 – Britain recognizes Iraq’s independence; China and Soviet Union break relations.
1937 – Japan establishes puppet Chinese government in Peking — now Beijing.
1939 – The Soviet Union is dropped from the League of Nations.
1941 – U.S. Marines make stand in battle for Wake Island in Pacific during World War II.
1946 – U.N. General Assembly votes to establish U.N. headquarters in New York City.
1952 – Eighty-four Korean Communist prisoners interned on Pongam Island are killed during a riot after attempting to escape.
1958 – The United States, Britain and France reject Soviet demands that they withdraw their troops from West Berlin and agree to liquidate the Allied occupation in West Berlin.
1962 – North Rhodesia’s first African-dominated government is formed under Kenneth Kaunda.
1967 – Israel submits to the United Nations a five-year plan to solve the Arab refugee problem conditioned on a general peace settlement between Israel and the Arab states.
1972 – U.S. Apollo 17 astronauts blast off from the moon after three days of exploration on lunar surface.
1981 – Israel annexes Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967.
1989 – Opposition leader Patricio Aylwin is elected president in Chile’s first free election since 1970.
1990 – In Hong Kong, 10 Vietnamese boat people set fire to themselves to protest a screening policy that could prevent them from settling in the West.
1991 – Former East German leader Erich Honecker, facing extradition to Germany and trial on manslaughter charges, is offered asylum in North Korea.
1994 – Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic asks former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to mediate peace in Bosnia.
1997 – Iranian President Mohammed Khatami says he is ready to re-establish dialogue with the United States, the first such statement since the 1979 revolution in Iran.
1998 – The Palestinian Council votes to revoke a paragraph in its charter that demanded the destruction of Israel.
2000 – Vladimir Putin, the first Russian president to visit Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union, holds talks with Fidel Castro in Havana.
2003 – Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf escapes an assassination attempt when a powerful bomb explodes on a bridge in Rawalpindi less than a minute after his motorcade crosses it.
2007 – A bus collides with a train in northern India, killing at least 16 people, including nine children on their way to school.
2009 – The military may not finish its surge of 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan until nearly a year from now, a senior U.S. commander says — a slower pace than President Barack Obama has described.
2011 – A commercial U.S. satellite company says it has captured a photo of China’s first aircraft carrier in the Yellow Sea off China’s coast.
2012 – A man opens fire inside an elementary school in the state of Connecticut, killing 26 people including 20 children in the second-deadliest school shooting in the U.S.
2014 — A last-minute deal that salvaged U.N. climate talks from collapse sends a signal the rich-poor divide that long held up progress can be overcome with a year to go before a landmark pact is supposed to be adopted in Paris. i
Today’s Birthdays:
Nostradamus, French astrologer and physician (1503-1566); Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer (1546-1601); James Bruce, Scottish explorer (1730-1794); Roger Fry, English artist (1866-1934); Shirley Jackson, U.S. author (1919-1965); Lee Remick, U.S. actress (1935-1991); Patty Duke, U.S. actress (1946–).
Thought for Today:
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories — Stanislaw J. Lec, Polish author (1909-1966).
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