On this day - November 26
2009-11-26 07:57
Today is Thursday, November 26, the 330th day of 2009. There are
35 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1095 - Pope Urban urges the faithful to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims, heralding start of Crusades.
1580 - Peace of Fleix ends Seventh War of Religion in France.
1648 - Pope Innocent X condemns Peace of Westphalia, which ended 30 Years War one month earlier.
1716 - A lion is first exhibited in America.
1764 - Jesuit order is suppressed in France.
1789 - A day of Thanksgiving is set aside by US President George Washington to observe the adoption of America's Constitution.
1812 - French army meets disaster in retreating across Russia's Beresina River.
1825 - The first US college social fraternity, Kappa Alpha, is formed at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
1857 - First Australian Parliament opens in Melbourne.
1896 - Russia discloses plan to seize Constantinople if Britain intervenes in Crete.
1922 - King Tutankhamen's tomb is opened in Egypt.
1939 - Soviet Union attacks Finland leading to 105-day Winter War.
1940 - Half-million Jews of Warsaw, Poland, are ordered to live within a walled ghetto.
1942 - The film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, has its world premiere at the Hollywood Theatre in New York.
1943 - The HMT Rohna, a British transport ship carrying US soldiers, is hit by a German missile off Algeria; 1 138 men are killed, including 1 015 American troops.
1949 - India adopts constitution as federal republic within British Commonwealth.
1950 - China enters the Korean conflict, launching a counteroffensive against soldiers from the United Nations, the United States and South Korea.
1965 - France launches its first satellite, sending a 41kg capsule into orbit.
1967 - Death toll is put at 250 in floods in central Portugal.
1970 - A Bolivian painter, disguised as a priest, tries to kill Pope Paul VI in Manila, Philippines, but pontiff escapes injury.
1975 - A federal jury in Sacramento, California, finds Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, guilty of trying to assassinate US President Gerald Ford.
1978 - Muslim religious leaders and politicians seeking to topple Shah of Iran call general strike that virtually paralyses the country.
1986 - Iranian missile slams into crowded residential district of Baghdad, Iraq, killing 48 civilians and wounding 52.
1987 - Powerful typhoon whips across Philippines, killing 270 people and damaging or destroying 14 000 homes.
1989 - El Salvador breaks relations with Nicaragua after weapons-loaded plane from that country is downed in El Salvador.
1990 - Five permanent members of UN Security Council agree on peace plan for Cambodia.
1991 - Unicef says fighting and crop failures in southern Sudan have forced unprecedented exodus of 200 000 people.
1992 - An aid agency predicts disaster if the United States sends a large military force to Somalia; Britain's Queen Elizabeth II announces she would start paying taxes on her personal income and take her children off the national payroll.
1993 - A US diplomat is kidnapped by Yemeni tribesmen. Government officials negotiate for his release in the first known kidnapping of a diplomat in faction-ridden Yemen.
1994 - A major offensive by the Russian-backed opposition fails to wrest Grozny, the capital of Chechnya from its government.
1995 - Rebel jets bomb Kabul, the Afghan capital, killing 35 people and wounding 140 others.
1996 - Supporters of President Alexander Lukashenko break away from Belarus' Parliament, setting up their own assembly.
1997 - Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invites foreign experts to live in his "presidential palaces" to prove that he has nothing to hide. The palaces remain closed to weapons inspectors.
1998 - The Supreme Court of Canada rules that authorities at elementary and secondary schools have the right to search a student without first obtaining a search warrant.
1999 - A Norwegian high-speed passenger ferry carrying 85 people sinks in the North Sea off western Norway, killing 16 people.
2000 - Florida certifies George W Bush as the winner of the state's electoral votes for the US presidential election. US Vice President and Democratic rival Al Gore challenges the decision.
2001 - Former French intelligence chief General Paul Aussaressess says in testimony that the orders he issued to torture and kill prisoners during the Algerian independence war were justifiable acts of duty.
2002 - Attorney Gloria Allred asks California authorities to investigate singer Michael Jackson because of news videotape of the star holding his baby son over a fourth-floor railing at a hotel in Germany.
2003 - Elections held in Northern Ireland result in gains for hard-line parties on both sides of the long-time conflict between unionists, who want the territory to remain a British province, and nationalists, who seek unification with the Republic of Ireland.
2004 - Hoping to entice North Korea back into nuclear disarmament talks, the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union announce that a deal to build two light-water reactors is still on the table.
2006 - Leftist protesters in Mexico trying to force out the Oaxaca state governor for alleged corruption set more fires after torching government offices and vehicles in a night of street battles with police.
2007 - A British teacher is arrested in Sudan for allegedly insulting Islam by naming a teddy bear Muhammad. Gillian Gibbons, 54, is jailed for more than a week and eventually freed.
2008 - Teams of heavily armed gunmen storm luxury hotels, a popular tourist attraction and a crowded train station in Mumbai, India, leaving at least 172 people and wounding 239 others after a 60-hour rampage.
Today's Birthdays:
Eugene Ionesco, Romanian-born French dramatist (1909-1994); Bruce Paltrow, US director/producer (1943-2002); Tina Turner, US pop singer (1939--); Illona Staller (La Cicciolina), porn star and Italian member of Parliament (1951--).
Thought For Today:
Love your neighbours, but don't pull down the fence - Chinese proverb.
Sapa-AP