● Dec 17 in History
1538 — Pope Paul III excommunicates England’s King Henry VIII.
1750 — Deborah Sampson, who fights in the American Revolutionary War as a man (“Robert Shurtleff”), is born in Plympton, Massachusetts. 1790 — The Aztec calendar stone is discovered in Mexico City.
1969 — The US Air Force closes its Project “Blue Book”, started in 1952, by finding no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings
1980 — Milton Obote begins his second term as president of Uganda.
1989 — More than 100 000 Soviet citizens turn out to honour Andrey Sakharov, a day before his burial in Moscow. Sakharov — a nuclear physicist, dissident, and activist for disarmament, peace and human rights — was arrested on January 22 1980 for his public protests in 1979 against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sent to internal exile in the city of Gorky, off limits to foreigners, he was kept under tight surveillance. He twice went on hunger strike before his wife, Yelena Bonner, was allowed to leave for heart surgery in the US. On December 19 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev told Sakharov that they could return to Moscow.
1996 — Kofi Annan of Ghana is appointed secretary-general of the UN.
2002 — English playwright Frederick Knott (“Dial M for Murder”, “Wait Until Dark”), 86, dies in NYC. 2002 — Malaysia wins control of two tiny islands off the northeast coast of Borneo, Ligitan and Sipadan, when the World Court rules in its favour after a 33-year dispute with Indonesia.
2010 — Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, a street vendor, sets himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, after police confiscate his fruit and vegetables. He dies on January 4 2011. His desperate act becomes the catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring. Mohamed lost his father at age three, worked from age 10, quit school in his late teens and supported his family on about $140 a month. Friends and family say police had targeted and mistreated him for years, regularly confiscating his small wheelbarrow of produce “because he did not have a vendor’s permit”. However, according to the head of the state office for employment and independent work, no permit is needed to sell from a cart. In 2011, Mohamed is awarded the Sakharov Prize. The Tunisian government honours him with a postage stamp. “The Protester” is named Time 2011 Person of the Year.