NOW & THEN
11 DECEMBER
1792: King Louis XVI of France went on trial accused of high treason and crimes against the state. He was guillotined on January 21, 1793.
1845: Sikhs crossed Sutlej River in India and surprised British, causing outbreak of war.
1903: The first wildlife preservation society in Britain was founded under the name Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire.
1905: Henry Campbellbannerman, son of the Lord Provost of Glasgow, formed a government following the resignation of Arthur Balfour, and was the first leader to be given official use of the title “prime minister”.
1914: Royal Flying Corps adopted the red, white and blue roundel.
1936: Edward VIII announced that he was abdicating the throne, after a reign of 325 days, in favour of his brother, the Duke of York, who became King George VI.
1941: United States declared war against Germany and Italy; the Dutch government in London declared war on Italy.
1946: The United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was established.
1961: Two US helicopter companies arrived in Saigon in first direct military support for South Vietnam’s battle against Communist guerrillas.
1961: Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi lieutenant-colonel and a major organiser of the Holocaust, was found guilty of war crimes by a court in Jerusalem. He was hanged on June 1, 1962.
1964: A terrorist fired a mortar shell at the United Nations building in New York while Che Guevara was making a speech.
1967: Prototype of the world’s first supersonic airliner, Concorde, revealed.
1972: Two Apollo 17 astronauts, Captain Eugene Cernan and Doctor Harrison Schmitt, landed on the Moon in lunar module Challenger.
1977: Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, co-leaders of the Peace People in Northern Ireland, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (the prize for 1976).
1978: Six masked men bound ten employees in the Lufthansa cargo area at New York’s Kennedy Airport and stole $5.5 million in cash and jewellery.
1981: In his last fight, 39-yearold Muhammad Ali was defeated over ten rounds by Trevor Berbick, in Nassau, Bahamas.
1981: Peru’s Javier Perez de Cuellar became secretarygeneral of the United Nations.
1987: Charlie Chaplin’s famous cane and bowler were sold at Christie’s for £82,500, and his boots for £38,500.
1996: The Conservative government’s paymastergeneral, David Willetts, resigned after a damning report about his involvement in the Commons cash-for-questions affair.
2009: American golfer Tiger Woods announced that he was to take an indefinite leave from professional golf to try to work on “healing” his family after revelations surrounding infidelity.
2013: It was announced that 20 people had died of bubonic plague in the small village of Mandritsara in Madagascar.