Sunday Times, Australia
The Mercury, Australia
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
Dec 6 2004
On this day
06dec04
1988 – Sources say ethnic violence kills at least three people and
injures six others in southern republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia.
1492 – Christopher Columbus discovers island of Hispaniola, now
divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
1534 – Spanish conquistadors establish presence in Quito, an Inca
city in the Andes.
1857 – British forces recapture Cawnpore in India.
1877 – Thomas Edison demonstrates the first sound recording, reciting
Mary had a Little Lamb at West Orange, New Jersey.
1889 – Death of Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the
Confederate States of America.
1906 – Self-government is granted in Transvaal and Orange River
colonies in what is now South Africa.
1907 – Frontier between Uganda and East Africa is defined; In one of
America’s worst coal mine disasters, 361 die at Mononagh, West
Virginia.
1916 – Bucharest, capital of Romania, falls to German troops.
1917 – Republic of Finland is proclaimed; Collision between Belgian
and French ammunition ships at Halifax, Nova Scotia, takes 1600
lives.
1921 – Britain signs peace treaty with Ireland under which Irish Free
State is established and Ireland accepts Dominion status.
1925 – Libyan frontier agreement is signed between Italy and Egypt.
1929 – Women’s suffrage begins in Turkey.
1938 – France and Germany sign pact on inviolability of their
existing frontier.
1941 – US President Franklin D Roosevelt appeals for peace to Japan’s
Emperor Hirohito – one day before the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. He also authorises the Manhattan Project, which results in
the creation of the atomic bomb.
1957 – America’s first attempt at putting a satellite into orbit
blows up on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1959 – UN General Assembly says Togoland should receive independence.
1961 – Heavy fighting erupts in Congo’s Katanga Province between
United Nations and Katanga forces.
1966 – Britain calls for United Nations sanctions against rebellious
Rhodesia, including ban on oil shipments.
1969 – A concert by The Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in
Livermore, California, is marred by the deaths of four people,
including one who is stabbed by a Hell’s Angel.
1971 – South Korea’s President Park Chung Hee warns of danger of
invasion from the north and declares national emergency.
1973 – Gerald Ford is sworn in as US vice-president following the
resignation of Spiro Agnew over alleged financial irregularities.
1975 – Six-day Balcombe Street Siege begins in London when four IRA
gunmen take a middle-aged couple hostage; US President Gerald Ford
arrives in Philippines for talks on new terms for US air and naval
bases there.
1978 – Constitution returning Spain to democracy is approved in
referendum.
1982 – Eleven soldiers and six civilians are killed when a bomb
planted by the Irish National Liberation Army explodes in a pub in
Ballykelly, Northern Ireland.
1984 – Death toll rises to 1600 from gas leak from US-built pesticide
plant in Bhopal, India.
1987 – Bangladesh government dissolves Parliament amid opposition
campaign to topple President Hussain Mohammad Ershad’s
administration.
1988 – Death of Roy Orbison, one of the greatest stars in American
rock and country music; Sources say ethnic violence kills at least
three people and injures six others in southern republics of
Azerbaijan and Armenia.
1989 – Gunman kills 14 women and wounds nine women and four men at
University of Montreal before killing himself; Car bomb believed to
be set by drug traffickers kills 59 in Colombia.
1990 – Iraqi President Saddam Hussein says he has asked parliament to
let all foreign nationals leave Iraq; General Hussain Mohammed
Ershad, who ruled Bangladesh for nine years after coming to power in
a coup, steps down at the height of a pro-democracy movement.
1991 – John Kerin is replaced as Australia’s federal treasurer after
five months, by Ralph Willis.
1992 – Hindu extremists destroy an ancient Muslim shrine in the
northern town of Ayodhya, India, that they believe Muslim invaders
built after destroying a major Hindu temple. Months of nationwide
Hindu-Muslim riots kill about 2,000 people.
1993 – Serb forces shell Sarajevo for five hours, taking aim at
shoppers bartering for food and mourners burying their dead. Five
people are killed and at least 27 wounded.
1994 – A 52-nation summit in Budapest charting a new strategy for a
more peaceful Europe ends in a deadlock over the Bosnian war.
1995 – A huge US transport plane lands at Tuzla, Bosnia airfield to
start the first concrete preparations for the NATO peace mission.
1996 – A mudslide kills at least eight workers repairing a dam in
north-western Japan.
1997 – A Russian Antonov-124 cargo aircraft with two fighter jets on
board crashes into an apartment block near Irkutsk; 49 bodies and 19
body fragments were recovered and 17 other people were unaccounted
for.
1998 – Six years after staging a bloody coup attempt, Former Lt Col
Hugo Chavez is elected president of Venezuela, dealing a blow to the
establishment that ruled the country for 40 years.
1999 – NASA says it has not detected a signal from the Mars Polar
Lander, two days after it began its descent to Mars. It is later
determined that the robot spacecraft was destroyed following a
software glitch; Georges Rutaganda, a leader of the Hutu militia
group, which led the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, is convicted of
genocide by a UN tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment.
2000 – Werner Klemperer, German-born character actor, dies.
Klemperer, who fled Germany in the 1930s with his father, Otto, a
distinguished conductor, won two Emmy Awards for his appearances in
the sitcom about World War Two allied prisoners of war, Hogan’s
Heroes.
2001 – The Taliban’s supreme Leader agrees to surrender Kandahar, the
militia’s birthplace and position of last stand in Afghanistan, to
tribal forces and puts himself under the protection of tribal
leaders.
2001 – Anti-Taliban forces capture the main base of Osama bin Laden
in the Tora Bora Mountains of eastern Afghanistan but fail to find
the Saudi-born militant.
2002 – Israeli forces kill 10 Palestinians, including two United
Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school employees, during a
pre-dawn incursion into the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
2002 – Exxon Mobil Corp says a federal court in Alaska has decided it
should pay $US4 billion ($A5.51 billion) in punitive damages for the
Exxon Valdez oil spill.
2003 – Miss Ireland, Rosanna Davison, daughter of singer Chris de
Burgh, is crowned Miss World 2003 in Communist China’s first
international beauty pageant.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress