Today is Sunday, November 29, the 333rd day of 2015. There are 32 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1580 – Sir Francis Drake returns to England from circumnavigating the globe.
1798 – Ferdinand IV of Naples declares war on France and enters Rome.
1880 – First Japanese Diet convenes.
1890 – The first U.S. Army-Navy football game is played, with Navy defeating Army 24-0 at West Point, New York.
1918 – Nicholas, King of Montenegro, is deposed, and the kingdom is united with Serbia.
1922 – Archeologists announce they have found fabulous treasures in the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt.
1929 – U.S. Navy Lieutenant Richard E. Byrd radios that he has made the first airplane flight over the South Pole.
1945 – Communist state is proclaimed in Yugoslavia, and monarchy is abolished.
1947 – United Nations announces plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab entities, with Jerusalem under United Nations control.
1952 – U.S. President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower keeps his campaign promise to visit Korea to assess the ongoing conflict.
1961 – Enos the chimp is launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbits Earth twice before returning.
1963 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson names a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
1964 – Several hundred thousand people demonstrate in Beijing against United States involvement in the Congo, calling it aggression.
1973 – More than 100 people perish in a department store fire in Kumamoto, Japan.
1976 – Following refusal by Palestinian guerrillas to surrender their weapons, Syria attempts to disarm the former combatants in the Lebanese civil war to avoid a possible military confrontation with Israel on the southern border.
1982 – The U.N. General Assembly demands Soviet forces withdraw from Afghanistan and allow Afghans to determine their own form of government. This is the fourth time in three years the Assembly has called for a withdrawal.
1989 – In response to a growing pro-democracy movement in Czechoslovakia, the Communist-run parliament ends the party’s 40-year monopoly on power.
1993 – Israeli troops capture the commander of the military wing of Yasser Arafat’s PLO faction after Palestinian militants go on a shooting spree.
1999 – Northern Ireland’s rival parties form a Protestant-Catholic government that requires bitter enemies to share power for the first time in history.
2001 – Representatives of the diamond industry and more than 30 governments agree to certify all legitimate shipments of rough diamonds in an unprecedented effort to weed out the trade in gems that has been used to fund civil wars in Africa.
2004 – China moves to expand its influence in a region long dominated by the United States, signing an accord with Southeast Asian nations aimed at creating the world’s largest free trade area by 2010 — a sprawling market of nearly 2 billion people.
2008 – Thousands of Roman Catholic faithful and President Raul Castro gather for the beatification of Friar Jose Olallo Valdes, a monk known as the “father of the poor” — the first ceremony of its kind on Cuban soil.
2009 – Iran approves plans to build 10 industrial-scale uranium enrichment facilities, a dramatic expansion of the program in defiance of U.N. demands it halt enrichment.
2010 – Iran’s president accuses Israel and the West of being behind a pair of daring bomb attacks that killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another in their cars on the streets of Tehran.
2012 — Jubilant Palestinians crowd around outdoor screens and television sets at home to watch the United Nations vote on granting them, at least formally, what they have long yearned for — a state of their own.
2014 — A judge dismisses murder charges against former President Hosni Mubarak and acquits his security chief over the killing of protesters during Egypt’s 2011 uprising, crushing any hope of a judicial reckoning on behalf of hundreds of victims of the revolt that toppled him.
Today’s Birthdays:
Giovanni Bellini, Italian artist (1426-1516); Gaetano Donizetti, Italian opera composer (1797-1848); Christian Doppler, Austrian physicist (1803-1853); Louisa May Alcott, U.S. writer (1832-1888); Kim Delaney, U.S. actress (1961–); Joel Coen, U.S. director (1954–); Don Cheadle, U.S. actor (1964–).
Thought For Today:
A conference is a meeting to decide where the next meeting will take place — Anonymous.
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