Today is Tuesday, Dec. 29, the 363rd day of 2015. There are 2 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1170 – Archbishop Thomas Becket is slain at the altar in Cathedral of Canterbury, England.
1721 – French occupy Mauritius and rename it Ile de France.
1789 – Tippoo of Mysore attacks Rajah of Travancore in India.
1797 – French capture Mayence, France, from Holy Roman Empire forces.
1857 – British and French forces take Canton in China.
1890 – U.S. troops massacre 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
1895 – L. Starr Jameson stages raid into Transvaal from Bechuanaland in South Africa.
1901 – Commonwealth of Australia is inaugurated after being constituted by an Act of the Imperial Parliament the previous year.
1921 – United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan sign Washington treaty to limit naval armaments.
1933 – Romanian Premier Ion Duca is slain by Iron Guard, and George Tartarescu succeeds him.
1934 – Japan renounces Washington naval treaty limiting naval armaments.
1940 – German bombers inflict greatest damage on London since Great Fire of 1666.
1962 – United Nations troops occupy Elizabethville, Katanga.
1965 – Independence is announced for Bechuanaland, which becomes Botswana.
1973 – Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos ends his elected term and begins to rule on basis of a takeover decree.
1989 – Czechoslovak parliament elects dissident playwright Vaclav Havel as its president without opposition.
1992 – Premier Milan Panic, the Serb-born American who pushed for peace in fragmented Yugoslavia, is ousted by Parliament in a vote that strengthens Serbia’s hard-line President Slobodan Milosevic.
1994 – A Turkish Airlines jet crashes in Turkey with 76 people aboard. Twenty-three people survive.
1995 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin returns to the Kremlin after a hospital stay.
1996 – Guatemalan government and guerrilla leaders sign an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict, bringing Central America’s last and longest civil war to an official close.
1998 – In Yemen, troops surround and fire on a band of Islamic extremists holding 16 tourists hostage, ending a kidnapping that leaves six of the hostages dead.
2001 – A series of fireworks explosions spark a massive fire in downtown Lima, Peru, killing 291 people.
2002 – Election commission officials in Serbia say the five-year term of Serbian President Milan Milutinovic expires at midnight, opening the possibility of his extradition to the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands.
2006 – Turkish Cypriots begin dismantling a bridge that blocked plans to relink war-divided Nicosia’s commercial center and was seen as the strongest symbol of the island’s partition. The bridge is gone 11 days later, but no breakthrough in reunification talks is evident.
2009 – North Korea acknowledges it has detained an American for illegally entering the reclusive country, news welcomed by relatives of a missionary who feared they would never hear from him again after he sneaked across the border.
2010 – Police in Denmark and Sweden say they have thwarted a terrorist attack possibly hours before it was to begin, arresting five men they say planned to shoot as many people as possible in a Copenhagen building housing the newsroom of a paper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
2011 – The presence of Arab League monitors in Syria re-energizes the anti-government protest movement, with tens of thousands turning out over the past three days in cities and neighborhoods where the observers are expected to visit.
2012 – Russia’s foreign minister says that Syrian President Bashar Assad has no intention of stepping down and it would be impossible to try to persuade him otherwise.
2014 – Ten die in a fire on an overnight ferry traveling from Greece to Italy and 427 are rescued.
Today’s Birthdays:
Jeanne d’Etoiles, Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of France’s King Louis XV (1721-1764); Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist (1876-1973); Viveca Lindfors, Swedish-born actress (1920-1995); Mary Tyler Moore, U.S. actress (1937–); Gelsey Kirkland, U.S. ballet dancer (1952–); Ted Danson, U.S. actor (1947–);Jude Law, British actor (1972–).
Thought For Today:
The time will come when Winter will ask us: What were you doing all the Summer? — Bohemian proverb.
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