This Day in History – December 12
This is the 346th day of 2022. There are 19 days left in 2022.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1946: A UN committee accepts a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of United Nations headquarters.
OTHER EVENTS
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.
1894: Japanese troops invade Korea.
1899: African American George Grant receives the first patent for a golf tee.
1906: President Theodore Roosevelt nominates Oscar Straus to be secretary of commerce and labour — the first Jewish Cabinet member.
1913: The Mona Lisa is recovered in Italy, two years after it was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris.
1920: Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.
1925: The first motel — the Motel Inn — opens in San Luis Obispo, California.
1985: An Arrow Air charter flight crashes after take-off from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 American soldiers and eight crew members.
1989: The British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.
1992: A strong earthquake kills 2,500 people on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.
1993: President Boris Yeltsin wins approval for his new constitution but extreme nationalists and Communists make a strong showing in Russia’s first multiparty elections since the 1917 Revolution.
1994: The Brazilian supreme court acquits former President Fernando Collor de Mello of corruption charges.
1997: Russia reaches an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for US$1.7 billion in loans, giving the State a chance to pay back wages to millions of public employees. Carlos the Jackal (international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez) goes on trial in Paris on charges of killing two French investigators and a Lebanese national; he is convicted and is now serving a life prison sentence.)
2000: Democrat Al Gore concedes defeat to Republican George W Bush.
2005: Anti-Syrian journalist Gibran Tueni is killed in a car bomb in Lebanon on the day the United Nations is expected to release a follow-up report implicating Syria in the slaying of a former Lebanese prime minister.
2006: Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam,”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.
2008: A British jury decides that a string of police failures caused the death of a Brazilian electrician shot by anti-terror police on July 22, after he was mistaken for a suicide bomber.
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.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
John Jay, US statesman and first US Chief Justice (1745-1829); Henry Wells, American businessman and founder of American Express Co & Wells Fargo & Co) (1805-1878); Matthias Hohner, German manufacturer of the harmonica (1833-1902); Alfred Werner, Swiss chemist (1866-1919); Volter Kilpi, Finnish writer (1874-1939); Kurt Magnus Atterberg, Swedish composer (1887-1974); Frank Sinatra, American singer and actor (1915-1998); Portia Simpson Miller, Jamaica’s seventh and first female prime minster (1945- )
– AP/Jamaica Observer