Reuters historical calendar – December 7

LONDON, Nov 30 (Reuters) – Following are some of the major events to have
occurred on Dec. 7 in modern history:

1916 – Herbert Asquith resigned as British prime minister and was replaced
by David Lloyd George, the war secretary, with a commitment to wage all-out
war on Germany.

1941 – Japanese planes attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour,
Hawaii, destroying many aircraft and ships and precipitating the U.S.
declaration of war on Japan.

1953 – David Ben Gurion, who had been prime minister of Israel since its
foundation, resigned.

1965 – Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of the Greek Orthodox Church
formally annulled the excommunication pronounced on the Church of Rome in 1054.

1971 – Libya announced the nationalisation of British Petroleum’s assets in
the country.

1972 – Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission, took off on its mission to the
moon.

1975 – The Indonesian army swept into East Timor as civil war broke out
after the Portuguese colonial rulers of three centuries left.

1982 – Charlie Brooks Jr., a prisoner on death row at Fort Worth prison,
Texas, was executed by lethal injection — the first to die by this method in
the United States.

1985 – Robert Graves, English poet and author of the novel “I, Claudius,”
died aged 90.

1988 – In Armenia, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale killed
more than 25,000 people.

1993 – The U.S. government said it had concealed 204 nuclear blasts at its
Nevada test site, more than one fifth of total tests, to keep the old Soviet
Union in the dark.

1993 – Don Ameche, who broke into Hollywood films as a suave leading man in
the 1930s but had to wait five decades to win his first Oscar for his role in
“Cocoon,” died.

1993 – A lone gunman aboard a packed rush-hour commuter train opened fire at
passengers just outside New York, killing six and wounding 19.

1993 – Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Africa’s longest serving leader and the only
president the Ivory Coast had known, died aged 88.

1995 – A probe from the spacecraft Galileo successfully entered the
atmosphere of the planet Jupiter.

1996 – Algerian President Liamine Zeroual signed into law constitutional
reforms that banned political parties based on religion or language.

2001 – Taliban rule over its last bastion of Kandahar in southern
Afghanistan ended with its forces laying down arms.

2002 – Miss Turkey, Azra Akin, won the Miss World competition in London. The
event was moved from Nigeria after 200 died there in violence between
Christians and Muslims sparked by a newspaper article on the competition that many
Muslims found blasphemous.

2003 – Former Nicaraguan president Arnoldo Aleman was convicted of fraud,
money laundering and misuse of public funds and sentenced to 20 years in prison
and fined.

11/30/04 19:02 ET