December 5
1766 British auctioneer James Christie held his first sale, in London. He went on to found Christie’s, the world’s oldest auction house.
1792 George Washington is re-elected as US President and John Adams as Vice-President.
1797 Napoleon Bonaparte arrives in Paris to command forces for an invasion of England.
1848 US President James Polk triggers the Gold Rush of ‘49 by confirming gold was discovered in California.
1876 Fire kills 295 people at Brooklyn Theatre in New York.
1892 Sir John Thompson becomes Prime Minister of Canada
1934 Parliament grants Turkish women voting and election rights.
1936 Soviet Union adopts new constitution under a Supreme Council.
1956 Union of British Togoland and Ghana is approved.
1956 British and French forces begin withdrawal from Egypt in the Suez War.
1977 Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with five Arab nations that were hostile to President Anwar Sadat’s peace overtures to Israel
1979 South Africa is expelled from a conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in New Delhi.
1994 Russia seals the border of the breakaway republic of Chechnya.
1996 Madeleine Albright is the first woman to be named US Secretary of State.
1997 Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is inaugurated as the first popularly elected mayor of Mexico City.
2001 Afghanistan factions sign a landmark power-sharing deal to set up a 30-member interim administration headed by Hamid Karzai.
2005 The first-ever elections to the board of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry ended successfully.
2006 Fiji’s military takes over running the country in bloodless coup.
2007 A man opens fire with a rifle at a busy Omaha department store, killing eight people before taking his own life.
2008 OJ Simpson is convicted to 15 years in his kidnapping case in Las Vegas.
2009 109 people are killed in Lame Horse nightclub fire at Perm, Russia.
2012 Popular jazz musician Dave Brubeck dies at the age of 91.
2013 Former South African president Nelson Mandela dies in his home in Johannesburg at the age of 95.
2014 Nasa’s new Orion spacecraft blasts off in its first phase to Mars.
2016 Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha dies at Apollo Hospital in Chennai.
HIGHLIGHT
2002
Former Myanmar dictator Ne Win dies
Myanmar’s former strongman General Ne Win, an independence hero turned dictator, died under house arrest, a lonely old man, disowned by his former proteges who now rule this country. He was 91. Ne Win, who gradually lost his behind-the-scenes influence after stepping down after 26 years of power in 1988, died in his lakeside villa with only his eldest daughter, Sandar Win, by his side. Both had been under house arrest after Sandar Win’s husband and the couple’s three sons were charged with plotting to overthrow the military government. The arrests, and the subsequent death sentence for the four men marked the official fall from grace of Ne Win, who was also detested by ordinary citizens for turning their once-prosperous nation into a basket-case economy, shunned by the West for its anti-democratic ways. The former dictator was cremated in the presence of about 25 relatives and friends without fanfare at a civilian crematorium and denied the military honours befitting a general.
