TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Monday, December 16, 2019

On this day in history:

1653 - Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.

1809 - Napoleon Bonaparte was divorced from the Empress Josephine by an act of the French Senate.

1824 - Hume and Hovell mistakenly arrive at Corio Bay, instead of Westernport Bay. 1838 - The Zulu chief Dingaan was defeated by a small force of Boers at Blood River celebrated in South Africa as ‘Dingaan’s Day’.

1845 - Thomas Mitchell departs Orange, New South Wales, in search of a great river flowing to the Gulf of Carpentaria. 1850 - The first immigrant ship, the Charlotte Jane, arrived at Lyttleton, New Zealand. 1860 - Burke makes the fateful decision to push on to the Gulf from Cooper Creek, despite waterless country and searing summer heat.

1901 - The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter, was printed for the first time.

1940 - French Premier Petain arrested Pierre Laval after learning of a plan for Laval to seize power and set up a new government with German support.

1944 - During World War II, the Battle of the Bulge began in Belgium. It was the final major German counteroffensive in the war.

1990 - Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftist priest, was elected president in Haiti’s first democratic elections.

1991 - The UN General Assembly rescinded its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism by a vote of 111-25. 1995 - NATO launched a military operation in support of the Bosnia peace agreement. 1996 - Britain’s agriculture minister announced the slaughter of an additional 100,000 cows thought to be at risk of contracting BSE in an effort to persuade the EU to lift its ban on Britain.

1998 - The US and Britain fired hundreds of missiles on Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s refusal to comply with U.N. weapons inspectors.

2001 - Cuba received the first commercial food shipment from the United States in nearly 40 years. The shipment was sent to help Cuba after Hurricane Michelle hit Cuba on November 4, 2001.