Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
Advertiser, Australia
The Mercury, Australia
Dec 7 2004
On this day: 07dec04
1988 – Huge earthquake in Soviet Armenia claims at least 25,000
lives.
1815 – France’s Marshal Ney is shot after a treason trial for aiding
Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.
1841 – Edward John Eyre arrives in Albany, Western Australia, after
first crossing of the Nullarbor Plain.
1858 – French and Spanish announce blockade of Cochin, China.
1889 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Gondoliers premieres in
London.
1895 – Ethiopians defeat Italians at Ambia Alagi, Abyssinia.
1901 – England and Italy agree on settling Sudan frontier.
1907 – Commonwealth and South Australia agree on the transfer of
Northern Territory to the Commonwealth.
1921 – Austria and United States resume diplomatic relations.
1922 – Northern Ireland votes for nonalignment in Irish Free State.
1940 – The British attack larger Italian forces in Libya by surprise,
capturing 40,000 prisoners in three days.
1941 – Japanese planes attack the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, destroying many aircraft and ships and precipitating the US
declaration of war on Japan.
1949 – Nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,
fleeing the Communist takeover of mainland China, establishes its
seat of government in Taiwan.
1952 – Riots break out in French Morocco.
1953 – David Ben-Gurion resigns as premier of Israel.
1965 – Pope Paul VI and ecumenical patriarch Athenagoras I of
Istanbul abolish the mutual excommunications of 1054 that split
Christianity into Catholic and Orthodox.
1970 – East Pakistan-based Awami League wins a majority government in
Pakistan’s general elections. In response, President Agha Mohammed
Yahya Khan suspends the government, triggering widespread rioting in
East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Deep divisions between East and West
Pakistan lead to civil war.
1971 – Unmanned Soviet space capsule sends back radio and television
signals from planet Mars.
1972 – Imelda Marcos, wife of Philippines’ President Ferdinand
Marcos, is slashed during public ceremony in Manila by man who is
killed at the scene.
1974 – Archbishop Makarios returns to Cyprus after five months in
exile, and says he will pardon those who plotted his overthrow.
1975 – Indonesia invades East Timor.
1988 – Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, at United Nations,
announces unilateral reduction of his country’s troops, tanks, combat
aircraft and artillery; Huge earthquake in Soviet Armenia claims at
least 25,000 lives.
1989 – Republic of Lithuania abolishes constitutional guarantee of
communist supremacy and legalises multiparty system.
1990 – GATT talks among 107 nations are suspended after failure to
end impasse between US and EC over reductions in farm subsidies.
1992 – The Indian Government announces a ban on fundamentalist groups
after more than 200 Muslim and Hindus are killed and a Muslim shrine
in Ayodhya is demolished.
1993 – Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Africa’s
longest-serving ruler, dies.
1994 – PLO chairman Yasser Arafat pledges to protect Israelis from
militant Islamic terrorists and insists that all Palestinians on the
West Bank and in Gaza respect his authority as “the law.”
1994 – President Sam Nujoma’s ruling South-West Africa People’s
Organisation wins more than two-thirds of the vote in Namibian
national elections.
1995 – Australian Federal Court finds Aboriginal Affairs Minister
Robert Tickner failed to follow due process in placing a 25-year ban
on the Hindmarsh Island Bridge.
1995 – A probe from the Galileo spacecraft enters the gases of
Jupiter’s atmosphere and sends back 75 minutes of data before it
disintegrates.
1996 – After nearly 18 days aloft, Columbia and its astronauts return
to Earth, ending the longest space shuttle flight ever.
1997 – One Austrian and two American skydivers are killed when their
parachutes fail to open over the South Pole.
1998 – President Boris Yeltsin rouses himself from his sickbed for
three hours, fires several of his top aides and then returns to a
Kremlin hospital where he is recuperating from pneumonia.
1999 – A teenage student apparently bent on revenge opens fire inside
a high school in the Netherlands, wounding a teacher and four
students in the first school shooting in Dutch history.
2000 – Activists protesting near a European Union summit in Nice,
France, set fire to a bank and attack fire services when they arrive
to put out the blaze. Many arriving leaders wipe tears from their
eyes after officials sprayed tear gas at protesters.
2001 – A consortium of philanthropic foundations announces an
initiative to provide treatment for an estimated 2.5 million pregnant
women infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
2001 – Americans hold services on the 60th anniversary of the Pearl
Harbor attack.
2002 – Iraq turns over to United Nations weapons inspectors a
document detailing its weapons of mass destruction programs and
industries with military applications, as required by a November UN
Security Council resolution.
2002 – Miss Turkey, Azra Akin, wins the Miss World competition
relocated to London from Nigeria. This followed the death of more
than 200 people in violence between Nigerian Christians and Muslims,
sparked by a newspaper article viewed by many Muslims as blasphemous.
2003 – Commonwealth leaders uphold their 18-month suspension of
Zimbabwe after tense debate that threatens to split Western and
developing-world members – and Zimbabwe, snubbed, withdraws from the
bloc of Britain and its former colonies. Commonwealth heads of state
declare Mugabe’s outcast status would stand until he made demanded
human rights and democratic reforms in his increasingly troubled
southern African nation.
–Boundary_(ID_sVlWsWdhg2UMPq3K8Bz18Q)–