TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2017

On this day in history:

1792 - Captain Arthur Phillip, first Governor of the New South Wales colony, returns to England.

1848 - Edmund Kennedy is killed by Aborigines just short of his destination of Cape York. 1894 - The world’s first motor show opened in Paris with nine exhibitors.

1931 - The Statute of Westminster gives complete legislative independence to countries of the British Commonwealth.

1936 - Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry American Wallis Warfield Simpson. He became the Duke of Windsor.

1937 - The Fascist Council in Rome, withdrew Italy from the League of Nations.

1941 - Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The US in turn declared war on the two countries. 1946 - The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was established by the UN General Assembly.

1967 - The prototype of the Concorde was shown for the first time in Toulouse, France. 1973 - West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Czech Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal formally nullified the 1938 Munich pact when they signed a treaty sanctioning Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

1988 - 62 people were killed in a Mexico City marketplace when tons of illegal fireworks exploded.

1994 - The world’s largest free trade zone was created when leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations signed a free-trade declaration known as The Miami Process. 1997 - Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams became the first political ally of the IRA to meet a British leader in 76 years. He conferred with Prime Minister Tony Blair in London.

1997 - More than 270 Tutsi refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo were killed by Juto guerillas in Mudende, Rwanda.

1997 - More than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth’s “greenhouse gases.”

2015 - Australian naturalist and controversial conservationist Harry Butler dies.