Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 9:
1917 – Turkish troops surrendered Jerusalem to British forces led by Viscount Allenby.
1961 – Tanganyika became independent within the Commonwealth, with Julius Nyerere as prime minister; the following year it became a republic.
1987 – The first riots of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, erupted on the Gaza Strip.
1994 – The British government and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, held their first formal talks for more than 70 years.
1996 – The United Nations authorised the start of a long-delayed “oil-for-food” deal with Iraq, enabling Baghdad to make a limited return to the world oil market for the first time since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
1998 – South African researchers discovered almost the entire skeleton of an ape-man estimated to be 3.6 million years old, the oldest such find anywhere in the world.
2002 – United Airlines filed for bankruptcy, the largest such case ever in the global airline industry, after high costs left the world’s No. 2 carrier with too much debt and little cash.
2005 – French socialist realist painter Boris Taslitzky, who risked death by drawing portraits on scraps of SS stationery he stole as a prisoner at a Nazi concentration camp, died. He was 94.
2005 – Southwest Airlines plane crashes through safety barrier at Chicago’s Midway Airport.
2008 – Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich arrested on corruption charges that alleged he tried to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
2016 – South Korea’s President Park impeached in parliamentary vote.
(Reuters)
