NOW & THEN
17 DECEMBER
1531: Pope Clement VII started Inquisition in Lisbon, Portugal.
1538: Pope Paul III excommunicated England’s King Henry VIII.
1790: The Aztec Calendar Stone was found, buried under the main square in Mexico City, during repair work to the city’s cathedral.
1843: The first print run of 6,000 copies of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol sold out in a week.
1865: Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony had its premiere in Vienna.
1885: France declared Madagascar a protectorate.
1903: Orville Wright made the first successful controlled flight in a powered aircraft, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
1914: Abbas II was deposed, and Prince Hussein Kemel became Khedive of Egypt, over which Britain proclaimed a protectorate.
1922: Last British troops left Irish Free State.
1939: The German cruiser Graf Spee was scuttled off Uruguay.
1956: Petrol rationing was imposed in Britain after closing of the Suez Canal.
1962: Joint committee of the House of Lords recommended that peers should be allowed to renounce their titles.
1967: Harold Holt, the Australian prime minister, disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach, near Melbourne. His body was never found, fuelling many theories regarding his disappearance, ranging from suicide to abduction by a Chinese submarine
1967: Sir Alec Rose, a greengrocer, arrived in Australia after completing a solo sea voyage of 14,500 miles in his yacht The Lively Lady.
1973: Thirty-one people were killed after Arab guerrillas hijacked a German airliner at Rome airport.
1983: Car bomb exploded outside Harrods in Knightsbridge, London, killing six people and injuring 90.
1984: Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? was No 1 in the charts.
1986: Mrs Davina Thompson became the world’s first heart, lungs and liver transplant patient, at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge.
1990: Ravenscraig workers decided not to fight closure of hot strip mill and loss of 770 jobs.
1990: MPS voted against reintroducing the death penalty.
1991: In Blackpool, the Fun House at the resort’s pleasure beach was destroyed by fire.
2003: Ian Huntley was given two life sentences at the Old Bailey for the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman at Soham, Lincolnshire. His former girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was jailed for three and a half years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
2010: Street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire. The act became the catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution, which sparked protests in several other Arab countries.
2012: Jiroeman Kimura of Japan, aged 116 years, was verified as world’s oldest man.
2013: Angela Merkel was elected for a third term as German chancellor.