HISTORY AT A GLANCE
TODAY is Friday, December 29, the 363rd day of 2017. There are 2 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1911 – Sun Yat-sen becomes the provisional President of the Republic of China; he formally takes office on January 1, 1912. 1934 – Japan renounces the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922
and the London Naval Treaty of 1930. 1937 – The Irish Free State is replaced by a new state called
Ireland with the adoption of a new constitution. 1940 – World War II: In the Second Great Fire of London, the Luftwaffe fire-bombs London, England, UK, killing almost 200 civilians. 1959 – Physicist Richard Feynman gives a speech entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, which is regarded as the birth of nanotechnology. 1972 – An Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 (a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar) crashes on approach to Miami International Airport, Florida, killing 101. 1975 – A bomb explodes at LaGuardia Airport in New York City,
killing 11 people and injuring 74. 1989 – Riots break-out after Hong Kong decides to forcibly
repatriate Vietnamese refugees. 1992 – Fernando Collor de Mello, president of Brazil, tries to resign amidst corruption charges, but is then impeached. 1996 – Guatemala and leaders of Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity sign a peace accord ending a 36year civil war. 1997 – Hong Kong begins to kill all the nation’s 1.25 million chickens to stop the spread of a potentially deadly influenza strain. 1998 – Leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologize for the 1970s genocide in Cambodia that claimed over one million lives. 2001 – A fire at the Mesa Redonda shopping centre in Lima,
Peru, kills at least 291. 2003 – The last known speaker of Akkala Sami dies, rendering
the language extinct. 2012 – A Tupolev Tu-204 airliner crashes in a ditch between the airport fence and the M3 highway after overshooting a runway at Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow, Russia, killing five people and leaving three others critically injured. 2013 – A suicide bomb attack at the Volgograd-1 railway station in the southern Russian city of Volgograd kills at least 18 people and wounds 40 others.