TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2018

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY:

1154 - Henry II became King of England.

1562 - The Battle of Dreux was fought between the Huguenots and the Catholics, beginning the French Wars of Religion.

1843 - Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published in England.

1865 - Chinese bushranger Sam Poo is hanged in Bathurst, Australia.

1887 - Jake Kilrain and Jim Smith fought in a bare knuckles fight which lasted 106 rounds and 2 hours and 30 minutes. The fight was ruled a draw and was halted due to darkness.

1932 - The British Broadcasting Corp began transmitting overseas with its “Empire Service” to Australia.

1957 - Air service between London and Moscow was inaugurated.

1964 - The newly-built town of Jindabyne, relocated for the building of the Snowy Mountain Hydro-electric scheme, is opened.

1978 - Indira Gandhi was expelled from the Lok Sabha for contempt and imprisoned.

1984 - Britain and China signed an accord returning Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997.

1986 - The Soviet Union announced it had freed dissident Andrei Sakharov from internal exile, and pardoned his wife, Yelena Bonner.

1998 - A four-day bombing of Iraq by British and American forces ended.

2000 - The UN. Security Council voted to impose sanctions on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers unless they closed all terrorist training camps and surrender US embassy bombing suspect Osama bin Laden.

Birthdays

William Parry 1790 Minnie Fiske 1865

Fritz Reiner 1888

Ralph Richardson 1902 Leonid Brezhnev (Russia) 1906

Jean Genet 1910

Edith Piaf 1915

David Susskind 1920 “Little” Jimmy Dickens 1920 Doug Harvey 1924

Galt MacDermot 1928 Howard Sackler 1929 Cicely Tyson 1933

Al Kaline 1934

Phil Ochs 1940