Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 7:
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.
1965 – Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of the Greek Orthodox Church formally annulled the excommunication pronounced on the Church of Rome in 1054.
1972 – The U.S. launched Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission, on its way to the moon.
1995 – A probe from the spacecraft Galileo successfully entered the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter.
1999 – NASA admitted that the $165 million Mars Polar Lander was almost certainly lost.
2001 – Taliban rule over its last bastion of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan ended with its forces laying down arms.
2004 – Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Afghanistan’s first popularly elected president, promising to bring peace to the war-torn nation and end the economy’s dependence on narcotics.
2005 – Fugitive Croatian General Ante Gotovina, one of the three most wanted war crimes suspects from the former Yugoslavia, was arrested in Spain.
2008 – Chefs prepare the world’s largest ceviche in Lima, Peru.
(Reuters)
