Today in History, 12/12

Highlights in history on this date:

1574 - Murad III succeeds as Sultan of Turkey on death of Selim II.

1677 - Brandenburg's Frederick William I takes Stettin, Poland; Denmark's King Christian V is defeated by Swedish force at Cassel, Germany.

1792 - Ludwig van Beethoven, aged 22 and newly arrived in Vienna, notes in his diary he has 15 ducats: enough for his first music lesson with Franz Joseph Haydn.

1859 - First Queensland government ministry is appointed.

1889 - Death of Robert Browning, English poet.

1894 - Japanese troops invade Korea.

1896 - Guglielmo Marconi gives the first public demonstration of wireless in London.

1913 - Leonardo Da Vinci's painting Mona Lisa is recovered in Florence, two years after its theft from the Louvre in Paris.

1915 - First all-metal plane, known as the Tin Donkey, flies for the first time.

1920 - Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.

1925 - "World's first motel", the Motel Inn, opens in San Luis Obispo, California.

1936 - Chinese Nationalist troops at Xi'an arrest their commander, Chiang Kai-shek, forcing him to fight invading Japanese instead of communists.

1939 - Death of Douglas Fairbanks senior, swashbuckling US actor.

1946 - A UN Committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of the UN headquarters.

1955 - First prototype of the hovercraft is patented by British engineer Christopher Cockerell.

1968 - Death of Tallulah Bankhead, US actress.

1989 - British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.

1991 - Boris Yeltsin wins landslide approval in Russian legislature for his new Commonwealth of Independent States.

1992 - A strong earthquake kills 2500 people on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.

1995 - ABC television and radio journalist Andrew Olle dies in Sydney aged 47, from a brain tumour.

1997 - Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, goes on trial in Paris on murder charges.

1999 - Maltese-registered tanker, the Erika, breaks in two during a violent storm off the north-west coast of France, spilling some three million gallons of heavy oil.

2006 - Death of Emmy-winning actor Peter Boyle, who played the tap-dancing monster in the movie Young Frankenstein and grouchy father Frank Barone in the TV series Everybody Loves Raymond.

2011 - Police take into custody Hohepa Morehu-Barlow, also known as Joel Barlow, 36, who is accused of defrauding Queensland Health of $16 million.

2012 - A sexual harassment claim against former House of Representatives Speaker Peter Slipper is dismissed, with the judge describing it as a "political attack".

2013 - Australia's High Court strikes down the ACT's same-sex marriage laws.

2015 - In Paris, delegates from 195 countries approve an agreement that seeks to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

2016 - Human remains found two weeks earlier inside a septic tank at a property in Brisbane's north are identified as belonging to 29-year-old Wayne Youngkin, who disappeared in 1986.

Today's Birthdays:

Gustave Flaubert, French author (1821-1880); Edvard Munch, Norwegian artist (1863-1944); Frank Sinatra, US singer-actor (1915-1998); John Osborne, English playwright (1929-1994); Dionne Warwick, US singer (1940-); Sheree J Wilson, US actress (1958-); Jennifer Connelly, US actress (1970-); Quan Yeomans, Australian musician, (1972-); Mayim Bialik, US actress (1975); Craig Moore, Australian soccer player (1975-).

Thought For Today:

There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: impatience and laziness. - Franz Kafka, Czech author (1883-1924).

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