TODAY'S HIGHLIGHT
On Dec. 11, 1972, Apollo 17’s lunar module landed on the moon with astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt aboard; they became the last two men to date to step onto the lunar surface.
ON THIS DATE
France’s King Louis XVI went before the Convention to face charges of treason. (Louis was convicted, and executed the following month.)
Indiana became the 19th state.
French inventor Georges Claude publicly displayed his first neon lamp, consisting of two 38-foot-long tubes, at the Paris Expo.
British Gen. Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem two days after his forces expelled the Ottoman Turks.
Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicated the throne so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson; his brother, Prince Albert, became King George VI.
Italy withdrew from the League of Nations.
Germany and Italy declared war on the United States; the U.S. responded in kind.
a U.S. aircraft carrier carrying Army helicopters arrived in Saigon — the first direct American military support for South Vietnam’s battle against Communist guerrillas.
President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating a $1.6 billion environmental“superfund”to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps. “Magnum P.I.,”starring Tom Selleck, premiered on CBS.
a jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, acquitted William Kennedy Smith of sexual assault and battery, rejecting the allegations of Patricia Bowman.
more than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth’s greenhouse gases.
in the first criminal indictment stemming from 9/11, federal prosecutors charged Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, with conspiring to murder thousands in the suicide hijackings. (Moussaoui pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2005 and was sentenced to life in prison.)
Former Nasdaq chairman Bernie Madoff was arrested, accused of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that destroyed thousands of people’s life savings and wrecked charities. (Madoff is serving a 150-year federal prison sentence.)
Time magazine selected Pope Francis as its Person of the Year, saying the Roman Catholic church’s new leader — the first from Latin America — had changed the perception of the 2,000-year-old institution in an extraordinary way in a short time.
A Bangladeshi immigrant set off a crude pipe bomb in a New York City subway passageway in a botched suicide bombing; it did not fully detonate and Akayed Ullah was the only one seriously hurt. (Ullah was convicted on terrorism charges in federal court; sentencing is set for April 5, 2019.)
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
“It takes a long time to understand nothing.” — Edward Dahlberg, American author and critic (1900-1977). — ASSOCIATED PRESS