December 28
1832 John C. Calhoun becomes the first US vice president to resign, stepping down over differences with President Andrew Jackson.
1846 Iowa becomes the 29th US state.
1895 World’s first movie theatre opens in Paris.
1908 Earthquake claims 80,000 lives in Messina, Italy.
1917 Bessarabia proclaims independence as Moldavian Republic.
1926 Imperial Airways begins England-India mail and passenger service.
1948 Egyptian Premier Nokrashy Pasha is assassinated.
1966 China detonates its fifth atomic bomb.
1972 Kim Il-sung becomes president of North Korea.
1973 The Endangered Species Act is passed in the United States.
1979 Afghanistan’s ousted President Hafizullah Ameen is executed.
1981 Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American test-tube baby, is born in Norfolk.
1983 Sunil Gavaskar breaks Sir Don Bradman’s record of 29 hundreds by scoring his 30th Test century in Chennai.
1985 Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian leaders sign an armistice designed to end 10 years of civil war.
1989 Playwright Vaclav Havel is sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia.
1994 CIA director R. James Woolsey resigns in the aftermath of the discovery of an American spy for Moscow.
1997 Egypt’s highest court backs a ban on female genital mutilation.
1998 Hindu radicals burn down a church and storm three others with axes, iron rods and hammers in western India.
2002 Yemen politician Jarallah Omar is shot and killed.
2003 British actor Alan Bates dies of cancer at the age of 69.
2005 European Union successfully launches Galileo, first satellite navigation system, from Kazakhstan.
2007 Nepal declared a federal democratic Republic by interim parliament, abolishing the monarchy.
2008 A suicide car bomber destroys school and market in Swat valley, northwest Pakistan.
2009 New Zealand yacht Alfa Romeo wins the Sydney to Hobart race.
2011 North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is laid to rest in Pyongyang.
2012 Iranian cargo ship sinks off Umm Al Quwain.
2013 Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal takes over as the new chief minister of Delhi.
2014 AirAsia plane on a regular flight from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore, crashes, killing all 162 on board.
HIGHLIGHT
2006
Wild Oats wins back-to-back title
Australian maxi Wild Oats claimed a rare second successive victory in the Sydney-Hobart yacht race when it crossed the finish line. The hi-tech 30-metre yacht had led for most of the 628-nautical mile race since it started in Sydney Harbour on Tuesday and crossed the finish line under spinnaker after a fast passage over the final stages. It won in an official time of two days eight hours 52 minutes and 33 seconds, about 14 hours outside the race record it set last year. “I feel like I’m a young man again,” Wild Oats owner Bob Oatley old reporters after greeting his winning crew. “I told them to play it safe and the boat would do the rest, and it did.” Australian 70-footer Ichi Ban was in second place more than 40 miles astern of Wild Oats after overtaking Australian maxi Skandia about 60 miles from the finish line in Hobart, capital of the southern island state of Tasmania.
