TODAY IN HISTORY
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte is proclaimed Emperor of France. He was crowned on December 2, 1804.
1951 The United Nations moves its headquarters to New York City.
1977 The United States, the Soviet Union and 29 other nations sign a United Nations pact banning artificial use of the weather as a weapon of war, pledging they would never attack each other by starting man-made storms, earthquakes or tidal waves.
1990 East and West Germany sign a monetary union treaty, the first step on the road to unification.
1991 Death of Đỗ Nhuận (born 1922), Vietnamese composer and general secretary of the Việt Nam Musicians’ Association. He is well-known for many songs, including Du Kích Ca (Guerrillas’ March), Du Kích Sông Thao (Guerrillas on the Thao River) and Giải Phóng Điện Biên (Liberation of Điện Biên). His Cô Sao (Miss Sao) and Người Tạc Tượng (The Sculptor) are the first operas ever written in Việt Nam.
1995 Scientists in California announce they have revived 25-million-year-old bacteria from the gut of a bee trapped in a piece of amber.
2000 The UN Security Council unanimously approves an arms embargo against Ethiopia and Eritrea following the latest flare-up in their two-year border war.
2001 Independent National Security Archive reveals that former US President Dwight D Eisenhower kept secret from US allies his orders to authorise military commanders to launch retaliatory nuclear attacks.
2006 Australian Prime Minister John Howard, during his first official visit to Ottawa, urges Canada to work with his country on climate change, much to the horror of environmentalists. Australia did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
2009 In the southern Philippines, mudslides tumbles down a rain-soaked mountain, burying dozens of shanties in a gold mining village and killing at least 26 people.
2010 Greece receives a 14.5 billion euro (US$18 billion) loan from the EU and can now repay its immediate debt, but still faces a mammoth task to claw its way out of recession.
2012 President Obama pledges that the United States will keep providing emergency aid to feed the world's hungry and said that firms had committed US$3 billion to improve agriculture.
2015 South Korea and India agree to step up defence co-operation while South Korea pledged US$10 billion in finance for infrastructure projects as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives for a visit.
2016 More than 150 people are feared dead by two landslides triggered by more than three days of heavy rain in central Sri Lanka.
2017 The EU fines Facebook 110 million euros (US$122 million) for providing misleading information over its 2014 buyout of mobile messaging service Whatsapp.
2019 Boeing acknowledges it has to correct flaws in its 737 MAX flight simulator software used to train pilots, after two deadly crashes involving the aircraft that killed 346 people.
2021 India records the highest recorded daily COVID-19 death toll to date in the world with 4,529 deaths.