| On this date in: |
| 1642 |
Dutch navigator Abel Tasman arrived in present-day New Zealand. |
| 1769 |
Dartmouth College in New Hampshire received its charter. |
| 1862 |
Confederate forces dealt Union troops a major defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia. |
| 1981 |
Authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. |
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| AP Photo |
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| 1988 |
PLO chairman Yasser Arafat addressed the U.N. General Assembly in Geneva, where it had reconvened after the United States refused to grant Arafat a visa to visit New York. |
| 1989 |
South African President F.W. de Klerk met for the first time with imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, at de Klerk’s office in Cape Town. |
| 1996 |
The U.N. Security Council chose Kofi Annan of Ghana to be the world body’s seventh secretary-general. |
| 2000 |
Republican George W. Bush claimed the presidency 36 days after Election Day. |
| 2001 |
The Pentagon released a captured videotape of Osama bin Laden in which the al-Qaida leader said the deaths and destruction achieved by the Sept. 11 attacks exceeded his “most optimistic” expectations. |
| 2001 |
Five suspected Islamic militants killed nine people in an attack on India’s parliament before being killed themselves. |
| 2001 |
President George W. Bush served formal notice that the United States was pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. |
| 2002 |
Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Boston archbishop because of the priest sex abuse scandal. |
| 2003 |
Ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Adwar, near his hometown of Tikrit. |
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| AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky |
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| 2007 |
Shareholders of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, approved a takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. |
| 2007 |
The Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball was released, implicating seven MVPs and 31 All-Stars. |
