This Day in History – December 31
Today is the 365th and final day of 2015.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2003: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that an outbreak of influenza has reached epidemic levels in 45 states and has already killed at least 42 children.
OTHER EVENTS
1851: Austrian Constitution is abolished. 1857: Britain’s Queen Victoria decides to make Ottawa the capital of Canada.
1879: US inventor Thomas A Edison gives first demonstration of his electric incandescent light at Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1966: United States says it will halt bombing of North Vietnam when Hanoi gives assurance that it will discuss peace terms seriously.
1974: Private US citizens are allowed to buy and own gold for the first time in more than 40 years.
1994: A New Year’s Eve assault by Russian forces on Grozny, Chechnya, produces one of the bloodiest days of the war. Both sides claim success. 1998: Eleven European nations usher in the new year and the euro.
1999: Russian President Boris Yeltsin announces his resignation.
2004: Locked doors at a nightclub in Buenos Aires, Brazil, block or slow the exit of many concertgoers fighting to escape a fire that kills 186 people and injures hundreds.
2005: British subway workers walk out in a 24-hour strike, disrupting the London Underground as tens of thousands of revellers throng in the capital to celebrate the new year.
2009: A US judge dismisses all charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in a crowded Baghdad intersection in 2007.
2013: Three members of a persecuted ethnic minority from China have been released from Guantanamo Bay.
2014: Lithuania becomes the 19th country to adopt the euro, but the Baltic country’s increasing integration with richer European nations has led to a wave of emigration that is emptying towns and causing worker shortages.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Jacques Cartier, French explorer (1491-1557); Henri Matisse, French artist-sculptor (1869-1954); Gottfried August Burger, German poet (1748- 1794); Anthony Hopkins, English actor (1937- ); Sarah Miles, British actress (1941- ); Donna Summer, US singer (1948-2012); Ben Kingsley, British actor (1943- ).
—AP
