Today in History
February 12
1736 Nadir Shah becomes King of Persia
1840 The Housatonic Railroad opens in Connecticut, US.
1870 Women in the Utah Territory gain the right to vote.
1885 German East Africa Company is chartered.
1912 Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, abdicates.
1935 The American airship USS Macon crashes and sinks in a storm off the coast of California.
1953 Britain and Egypt agree to end Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan
1973 First American prisoners of war from the Vietnam conflict released.
1986 Britain and France sign treaty for building rail tunnel under the English channel
1990 At least 18 die in ethnic rioting in Dushanbe, capital of Soviet republic of Tajikistan.
1993 Ousted Mali dictator Mousa Traore and three top aides are sentenced to death for ordering the killing of protesters.
1994 Norwegian Edvard Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’ is stolen from a museum in Oslo.
1996 Yasser Arafat is sworn in as the first elected Palestinian president.
1997 Hwang Jang Yop, a confidant of North Korean leader Kim Jong II, defects in Beijing and seeks asylum in South Korea.
1998 Sudan’s first vice-president and at least seven others are killed when their plane overshoots a runway and plunges into a river in southern Sudan.
1999 The US Senate acquit William Jefferson Clinton of perjury and obstruction of justice.
2000 Charles Schulz, creator of the immensely popular Peanuts comic strip dies.
2002 Iran Air Tours flight 956 crashes into a mountain in Iran killing 117 people.
2007 The 14th session of the UAE’s Federal National Council, the first to include elected members, is inaugurated.
2008 Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologises on behalf of Australian government to indigenous people for past injustices.
2009 49 killed after a Continental Connection aircraft crash-lands into a house in New York.
2011 Taliban attacks police headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan and killing 19 people.
2014 American Emmy-winning comedian and actor Sid Caesar dies at the age of 91.
2015 Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine agree a deal that offers a “glimmer of hope” for an end to fighting in eastern Ukraine.
HIGHLIGHT
2006
Jaws author dies at 65
Peter Benchley, author of the bestseller Jaws that was the basis for the blockbuster movie that terrified beachgoers and kept many out of the water for years, died at his home at age 65. Benchley, well-known for other water-based suspense fiction including The Deep and The Island, which also spawned films, died of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, said his son-in-law Chris Turner. Benchley was diagnosed with the condition last autumn and his health had been deteriorating, but his death at this time had not been expected, according to Turner. “It was peaceful,” he said, adding that the writer’s wife Wendy and other family members were by his side at their Princeton, New Jersey home. It was the 1974 novel Jaws, about a series of gruesome shark attacks that cause panic in a placid beach resort, that Benchley won the kind of fame rarely accorded to any writer of popular fiction. The book has sold more than 20 million copies, and Benchley even had a cameo as a reporter in the 1975 Steven Spielberg film, which spawned a series of inferior sequels.
