Today in history
Today is Saturday, December 29, the 363rd day of 2018. There are two days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1170 — Archbishop Thomas Becket is slain at the
altar in the Cathedral of Canterbury, England.
1857 — British and French forces take Canton in
China.
1876 — The steamer SS Lady of the Lake is wrecked after running aground in dense fog and galeforce winds at Long Bay, north of the Nuggets Lighthouse.
1890 — United States troops massacre more than 200 Sioux men, women and children at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
1901 — The Commonwealth of Australia is inaugurated after being constituted by an Act of the Imperial Parliament the previous year.
1921 — The US, Britain, France, Italy and Japan sign the Washington Treaty to limit naval armaments.
1940 — German bombers inflict the greatest damage on London since the Great Fire of
1666.
1944 — Martin Eyles goes on a shooting rampage in Napier with a pistol stolen from a Napier house evacuated during the Hawke’s Bay earthquake 14 years earlier. He kills two and wounds three others before he is shot and wounded by police. He is later sentenced to life in prison.
1965 — Independence is announced for Bechuanaland, which will became the Republic of Botswana on September 30, 1966. 1973 — Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos ends his elected term and begins to rule on the basis of a takeover decree.
1989 — The Czechoslovak Parliament elects dissident playwright Vaclav Havel as its president without opposition.
1992 — Premier Milan Panic, the Serbborn American who pushed for peace in a fragmented Yugoslavia, is ousted by Parliament in a vote that strengthens Serbia’s hardline president Slobodan Milosevic.
1993 — A dozen packed buses travel across rural Bosnian battlegrounds, taking about 900 Sarajevans to a new life as refugees in Croatia.
1994 — A Turkish Airlines jet crashes in Turkey with 76 people aboard. Twentythree people survive.
1996 — Guatemalan government and guerrilla leaders sign an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict, bringing Central America’s last and longest civil war to an official close.
1998 — In Yemen, troops surround and fire on a band of Islamic extremists holding 16 tourists hostage, ending the kidnapping but leaving six of the hostages dead.
1999 — The spokesman for the Aum Shinrikyo cult is freed from prison and vows to resume his place in the doomsdaypreaching group that almost five years previously released nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway.
2000 — The Russian defence minister to Iran,
Igor Sergeyev, signs a deal permitting the training of Iranian army officers in Russia.
2001 — A series of fireworks explosions sparks a massive fire in downtown Lima, the capital of Peru, killing 291 people. The blaze, fuelled by dozens of footpath stands selling illegal fireworks, quickly spreads throughout the crowded commercial district.
2002 — Election commission officials in Serbia say the fiveyear term of Serbian president Milan Milutinovic expires at midnight, opening the possibility of his extradition to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands.
2007 — Thousands of Kenyans enraged over delays in announcing the country’s next president after the December 27 elections, burn down homes and attack political rivals with sticks and machetes.
Today’s birthdays
Charles Goodyear, US inventor
(18001860); Andrew Johnson, 17th
US president (18081875);
William Gladstone, British prime minister (18091898); Barbara Steele,
British actress (1937); Jon Voight,
US actor (1938); Ray Thomas, British musician (1941); Glenn Wilson, New
Zealandborn British psychologist (1942);
Rodney Redmond, New Zealand cricketer (1944); Marianne Faithfull, British singer (1946); Ted Danson, US actor (1947); Gelsey Kirkland, US ballet dancer (1952); Brian Sergent, New Zealand actor (1959); Wynton Rufer, New Zealand football international (1962); Geoff Dolan, New Zealand actor (1964); Jude Law, British actor (1972).
Thought for today:
The time will come when winter will ask us: What were you doing all the summer? — Bohemian proverb.