This Day in History – Dec 12
Today is the 346th day of 2014. There are 19 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1953: US test pilot Chuck Yeager reaches Mach 2.3 (2.3 times the speed of sound) in a Bell X-1A rocket plane.
OTHER EVENTS
1574: Murad III succeeds as Sultan of Turkey on death of Selim II.
1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovers New Zealand.
1800: Washington, DC, is established as the capital of the United States.
1804: Spain declares war on Britain.
1870: Joseph H Rainey of South Carolina takes his seat in the US House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman.
1899: African-American George Grant receives the first patent for a golf tee.
1913: The Mona Lisa is recovered in Italy, two years after it was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris.
1937: Japanese aircraft sinks the US gunboat Panay on China’s Yangtze River. Japan later apologises and pays $2.2 million in reparations.
1946: A UN committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of UN headquarters.
1963: Kenya becomes independent within British Commonwealth and a republic a year later.
1985: An Arrow Air charter flight crashes after take-off from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 American soldiers and eight crew members.
1993: President Boris Yeltsin wins approval of his new constitution, but extreme nationalists and Communists make a strong showing in Russia’s first multiparty elections since the 1917 Revolution.
1997: Russia reaches an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for $1.7 billion in loans, giving the state a chance to pay back wages to millions of public employees.
1999: A Maltese-registered tanker, the Erika, breaks in two during a violent sea storm off the northwest coast of France, spilling some 3 million gallons (11.4 million litres) of heavy oil.
2000: The US Supreme Court reverses the Florida Supreme Court’s order to begin manual recounts of presidential votes in certain counties and Democrat Al Gore concedes defeat to Republican George W Bush.
2003: Germany says it will build a national memorial to homosexuals persecuted or killed under the Nazis, complementing the planned German memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
2006: Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as “the butcher of Addis Ababa,” is convicted of genocide in a rare case of an African strongman being held to account by his own country.
2009: Emails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages do not support claims that the science of global warming was faked.
2010: Israel’s leader dismisses a call from a key government partner to share the holy city of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, a reminder of the obstacles facing already troubled peacemaking efforts.
2012: North Korea successfully launches its first satellite into space, heightening concerns it has moved one step closer to being capable of lobbing nuclear bombs over the Pacific.
2013: The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial says he suffers from schizophrenia and hallucinated while gesturing incoherently just three feet (one metre) away from President Barack Obama and other world leaders, outraging deaf people worldwide who said his signs amounted to gibberish.