This Day in History
Saturday, December 26, the 360th day of 2009. There are five days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight
1996: Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is found strangled in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado.
Other Notable Events
1492: Explorer Christopher Columbus founds a European settlement on the island of Hispaniola.
1793: French victory at Weissenburg forces allies to retreat across the Rhine River.
1799: George Washington is eulogised by Col Henry Lee as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen”.
1805: Peace of Pressburg is signed between France and Austria.
1827: Turkey’s Sultan Mohammed II rejects right of allies to mediate in war with Greece.
1865: American inventor James H Nason receives patent for the coffee percolator.
1901: The Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria is completed.
1917: During World War I, the United States (US) government takes over operation of the nation’s railroads.
1938: Pan-American Conference approves Declaration of Peru against all foreign intervention.
1941: As Japanese forces approach, the US declares Manila, Philippines, an open city; Winston Churchill becomes the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the US Congress.
1956: Twenty-one African Americans are arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for riding in the “white” sections of buses during a mass defiance of laws requiring separation of the races on public transportation.
1962: Eight East Germans escape to West Berlin by crashing a bus through barriers at border checkpoint.
1971: Sixteen Vietnam War veterans seize the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour to dramatise their anti-war stand.
1977: Argentina’s government announces a holiday amnesty, freeing 432 political prisoners of the 3,607 being held under a state of siege imposed in March 1976.
1984: Nicaraguan defence minister reports a death toll of at least 5,600 people in the fighting between government troops and US-backed contras rebels.
1989: Forces loyal to the Romanian communist government begin surrendering as a videotape aired on television shows the bloody bodies of executed leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
1991: Algeria holds its first multiparty parliamentary elections since independence from France in 1962.
1992: Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic concedes defeat in Serbian presidential elections and congratulates the incumbent, hard-liner Slobodan Milosevic.
1997: French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen is convicted of denying Nazi crimes after he said the gas chambers were a “historic detail” at a Munich news conference.
1998: Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, considered to be among the architects of the group’s genocidal reign in the 1970s, surrender to the government.
2000: Russian ground controllers lose contact for nearly 20 hours with the Mir space station before re-establishing communication, allaying fears that the accident-prone, 140-tonne vessel might have spun dangerously out of control.
2002: The US State Department verifies reports that the Myanmar military had carried out mass rapes as part of a campaign from 1996 to 2001 to suppress an ethnic insurgency in Shan state.
2003: An earthquake rocks the Iranian city of Bam, 980 kilometres (610 miles) south-east of the capital Teheran, killing 50,000 people and destroying 90 per cent of the city’s residential area.
2004: Massive tsunami triggered by earthquakes tears across the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities in 12 countries, killing at least 216,000 people, and leaving more than a million people homeless.
2006: Gerald R Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon’s scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America’s history, dies at 93.
2007: A ruptured gasoline pipeline explodes in flames, killing at least 34 people near Nigeria’s main city of Lagos.
2008: Chinese warships head toward Somali waters to combat piracy, the first time the communist country has sent ships on a mission that could involve fighting so far beyond its territorial waters.
Today’s Birthdays
Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor of first computer (1791-1871); George Romney, English artist (1734-1802); Henry Miller, US writer (1891-1980), Mao Tse-tung, Chinese leader (1893-1976); Leopold Mannes, US co-developer of Kodachrome film (1899-1964); Alan King, US comedian (1927-2004); Abdul “Duke” Fakir, US rhythm-and-blues singer (1935-); David Sedaris, US humorist/author (1956-).