TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2017 On this day in history:

1715 - James Stuart, the “Old Pretender”, landed at Petershead after his exile in France.

1817 - Phillip Parker King sets off to map the northern coast of Australia uncharted by Flinders.

1845 - Land for the first gold mine in Australia is purchased. 1894 - French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason in a court-martial that triggered worldwide charges of anti-Semitism. Dreyfus was eventually vindicated.

1895 - German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen made the first X-ray, of his wife’s hand. 1941 - British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived in Washington for a wartime conference with US President Franklin Roosevelt.

1956 - The last British and French forces evacuated Egypt. 1989 - Romania’s hard-line Communist ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, was overthrown in a popular uprising.

1989 - A bus crash in Kempsey, New South Wales, kills 35 people.

1990 - Lech Walesa was sworn in as Poland’s first popularly elected president.

1996 - A car bomb exploded in Belfast, injuring a known IRA supporter. Police suspected that Protestant loyalists were responsible for the attack. 2001 - Thirty Afghans, including two women, were sworn in as part of the new interim government in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai was the head of the post-Taliban government.

2001 - Richard Reid attempts to destroy a passenger airliner by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes aboard American Airlines Flight 63.

2008 - An ash dike ruptured at a solid waste containment area in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing 1.1 billion US gallons (4,200,000 m3) of coal fly ash slurry.

2010 - The repeal of the Don't ask, don't tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, is signed into law by President Barack Obama.

2016 - Syrian government forces retake control of the besieged areas of Aleppo.