ON THIS DAY
Today is Saturday, December 29. Highlights in history on this date:
- Archbishop Thomas Becket is slain at the altar in the Cathedral of Canterbury, England.
- A Maori man known only as Tuhiata or Tuhi, is hanged in Wellington for the murder of the artist Mary Dobie at Opunake.
- US troops massacre 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
- Commonwealth of Australia is inaugurated after being constituted by an Act of the Imperial Parliament in 1900.
- German bombers inflict greatest damage on London since Great Fire of 1666.
- Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos ends his elected term and begins to rule on basis of a takeover decree.
- Czechoslovak Parliament elects dissident playwright Vaclav Havel as its president without opposition.
- A dozen packed buses ride across rural Bosnian battlegrounds, taking about 900 Sarajevans to a new life as refugees in Croatia.
- Guatemalan government and guerrilla leaders sign an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict, bringing Central America’s last and longest civil war to a close.
- A woman protesting with port workers on a picket line at Lyttelton suffers fatal injuries when she is run down by a vehicle trying to breach the line.
- A series of fireworks explosions spark amassive fire in downtown Lima, Peru, killing 291 people.
- Paramedics spray Indian beaches with bleach and vaccinate tsunami survivors, as Indonesian authorities bulldoze mass graves for thousands of corpses lining the streets and lawns of Banda Aceh.
- An estimated 47 million people visited New York City in 2008, beating last year by 1 million visitors, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announces.
- Police in Denmark and Sweden say they thwarted a terrorist attack possibly hours before it was to begin, arresting five men they say planned to shoot people in a Copenhagen building housing the newsroom of a paper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
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