TODAY IN HISTORY

1586 Sir Thomas Herriot introduces potatoes to England from Colombia.

1694 English parliamentary election set for every 3

years.

1736 Astronomer Anders Celsius takes measurements that confirm Newton’s theory that the earth was an ellipsoid rather than the previously accepted sphere.

1854 Eureka Stockade: In what is claimed by many to be the birth of Australian democracy, more than 20 gold miners at Ballarat, Victoria, are killed by state troopers in an uprising over mining licences.

1930 Airborn chemicals combine with fog to kill 60 in

Meuse Valley, Belgium.

1944 The Greek Civil War breaks out in a newly-liberated Greece, between communists and royalists.

1948 Chinese refugee ship Kiangya explodes in East

China Sea killing 1,100.

1964 Police arrest some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in.

1967 First human heart transplant performed by Dr

Christian Barnard in South Africa.

1971 Indo-pakistani War of 1971: India invades West Pakistan and a full scale war begins claiming hundreds of lives.

1984 Bhopal disaster: Union Carbide pesticide plant leak 45 tons of methyl isocyanate and other toxic compounds in Bhopal, India, kills 2,259 (official figure) – other estimates as high as 16,000 (including later deaths) and over half a million injured.

1989 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H W Bush declare the Cold War over.

1997 121 countries sign the treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel land mines in Ottawa, but the big three refuse to sign the treaty, the United States, People’s Republic of China, and Russia.

1999 NASA loses contact with Mars Polar Lander shortly before its planned atmospheric entry. The failure of the mission was blamed on a software error.

2007 Participants in the UN climate summit discuss how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol’s targets expire.

2011 President Thein Sein of Myanma signs a law that would allow peaceful demonstrations to take place in the country for the first time.

2012 Việt Nam accuses China of cutting seismic survey cables from territorial waters in the East Sea (South China Sea), disputed by Việt Nam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei.

2014 Somalia and North Korea tie for the most corrupt country in the world according to this year’s ranking on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

2015 South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal overturns Oscar Pistorius’s manslaughter conviction, and found him guilty of murder.

2020 Germany announces a strict lockdown till January 10 after looser restrictions failed to prevent COVID-19 numbers surging. AFP/REUTERS/VNS