Today in History
By Correspondent
| YEARÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â | DAY | EVENT |
| 1111 | Feb 12 | Henry V of Germany presented himself to Pope Paschal II for coronation along with treaty terms that commanded the clergy to restore fiefs of the crown to Henry. The pope refused to crown and Henry left Rome taking the pope with him. When Paschal was unable to get help, he confirmed Henry’s right of investiture and crowned him. |
| 1242 | Feb 12 | Henry VII, Roman Catholic German king (1220-35), committed suicide. |
| 1294 | Feb 12 | Kublai Khan, the conqueror of Asia, died at the age of 80. |
| 1486 | Feb 12 | In Toledo, Spain, some 750 lapsed Christians were paraded through the streets of Toledo from the Church of San Pedro Martir to the cathedral in order to be reconciled to the Christian faith. In the Auto Da Fe at Toledo the Jews were forced to recant, fined 1/5 of their property and permanently forbidden to wear decent clothes or hold office. |
| 1502 | Feb 12 | Isabella issued a royal order giving all remaining Moors in the realms of Castile the choice between baptism and expulsion. |
| 1502 | Feb 12 | Vasco da Gama, Portuguese explorer, departed on a second trip to India with 20 well-armed ships. |
| 1541 | Feb 12 | Santiago, Chile, was founded by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, a lieutenant of Pizarro. |
| 1554 | Feb 12 | Lady Jane Grey (17), who had claimed the throne of England for nine days, the Queen of England for thirteen days, was beheaded on Tower Hill along with her husband, Guildford Dudley, after being condemned for high treason. |
| 1588 | Feb 12 | John Winthrop, English attorney, puritan, 1st gov of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was born. |
| 1663 | Feb 12 | Cotton Mather (d.1728), American clergyman and witchcraft specialist, was born. |
| 1665 | Feb 12 | Rudolph J. Camerarius, German botanist, physician (sexuality plant), was born. |
| 1683 | Feb 12 | A Christian Army, led by Charles, the Duke of Lorraine and King John Sobieski of Poland, routed a huge Ottoman army surrounding Vienna. |
| 1733 | Feb 12 | English colonists led by James Oglethorpe founded Savannah, Ga. Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe sailed up the Savannah River with 144 English men, women and children and in the name of King George II chartered the Georgia Crown Colony. He created the town of Savannah, to establish an ideal colony where silk and wine would be produced, based on a grid of streets around six large squares. |
| 1763 | Feb 12 | Pierre de Mariveaux (b.1688), French novelist and playwright, died. |
| 1768 | Feb 12 | Francis II, the Last Holy Roman Emperor (1792-1806), was born. |
| 1775 | Feb 12 | Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams was born. |
| 1791 | Feb 12 | Peter Cooper, industrialist, philanthropist (Cooper Union), was born. |
| 1793 | Feb 12 | The US federal government passed its first fugitive slave law. This gave slave holders the right to reclaim their human property in free states. |
| 1797 | Feb 12 | Haydn’s song “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” (popularized years later as “Deutschland Uber Alles,” by Nazis), premiered in Vienna. |
| 1809 | Feb 12 | Charles Robert Darwin (d.1874) was born. |
| 1809 | Feb 12 | Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the US, was born in Hardin County (present-day Larue County), Kentucky |
| 1817 | Feb 12 | Argentina’s Jose de San Martin, having led a revolutionary army over the Andes into Chile, helped defeat the Spanish forces at Chacabuco. The royalists lost 500 men in the battle and another 600 were taken prisoner. |
| 1818 | Feb 12 | Chile officially proclaimed its independence, more than seven years after initially renouncing Spanish rule |
| 1821 | Feb 12 | The Mercantile Library of City of NY opened. |
| 1825 | Feb 12 | Creek Indian treaty signed. Tribal chiefs agreed to turn over all their land in Georgia to the government and migrate west by Sept 1, 1826. |
| 1828 | Feb 12 | George Meredith, English poet and novelist, was born. |
| 1836 | Feb 12 | Mexican General Santa Anna crossed the Rio Grande en route to the Alamo. |
| 1839 | Feb 12 | Aroostook War took place over a boundary dispute between Maine and New Brunswick. |
| 1850 | Feb 12 | Washington’s original Farewell Address manuscript sold for $2,300. |
| 1857 | Feb 12 | Eugene Atget, French photographer, was born. He took over 10,000 photographs documenting Paris. |
| 1861 | Feb 12 | State troops seized US munitions in Napoleon, Ak. |
| 1870 | Feb 12 | Women in the Utah Territory gained the right to vote. However, that right was taken away in 1887. |
| 1870 | Feb 12 | An official proclamation set April 15 as last day of grace for US silver coins to circulate in Canada. |
| 1871 | Feb 12 | In France the new National Assembly opened at Bordeaux. Two-thirds of members were conservatives and wished the war to end. |
| 1873 | Feb 12 | The US Congress abolished bimetallism and authorized $1 & $3 gold coins. |
| 1873 | Feb 12 | The 1st Spanish Republic was proclaimed. King Amadeo I abdicated following a 2-year reign. Emilio Cistelar y Ripolo (40) became prime minister, but the Carlist civil war continued. |
| 1874 | Feb 12 | Auguste Perret, French architect, was born. He pioneered in designs of reinforced concrete buildings. |
| 1874 | Feb 12 | King David Kalakaua of Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), became the 1st king to visit US. King Lunalilo had died without an heir and the legislature elected lawyer David Kalakaua as king. |
| 1876 | Feb 12 | Al Spalding opened a sporting good shop. |
| 1877 | Feb 12 | The 1st news dispatch by telephone was made between Boston and Salem, Mass. |
| 1877 | Feb 12 | US railroad builders struck against a wage reduction. |
| 1879 | Feb 12 | 1st artificial ice rink in North America was at Madison Square Garden, NYC. |
| 1880 | Feb 12 | John L. Lewis, American labor leader, was born. |
| 1892 | Feb 12 | Illinois made President Lincoln’s birthday a state holiday. Other states followed suit over the years. |
| 1893 | Feb 12 | Omar Bradley, U.S. army general, was born. He led the largest concentration of ground troops in Europe during World War II. |
| 1898 | Feb 12 | [Le]Roy Harris, composer (When Johnny Comes Marching Home), was born in Oklahoma. |
| 1907 | Feb 12 | Bodies continued to wash ashore from the steamer Larchmont, which had collided the previous with a schooner off New England’s Block Island. The vessel’s quartermaster, James E. Staples, claimed a loss of 332. |
| 1908 | Feb 12 | The first round-the-world automobile race began in New York City. It ended in Paris the following July with the drivers of the American car, a Thomas Speedway Flyer, was declared the winner over teams from Germany and Italy. The Flyer was made by the E.R. Thomas Motor Co. of Buffalo, NY, was initially driven by Montague Roberts and George Schuster. Roberts dropped out in Wyoming. Schuster took over as captain and chief driver from San Francisco, which was reached on March 24. |
| 1909 | Feb 12 | The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by 60 people gathered in NYC to discuss recent race riots and how to fight discrimination. They were initially known as the National Negro committee and signed a proclamation known as “The Call.” It was based on the Niagara movement of 1905. Mary White Ovington (1865-1951) was one of the founders. |
| 1912 | Feb 12 | China became a republic following the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. Pu Yi (reign name Hsuan T’ung), the last Ch’ing (Manchu) emperor of China, abdicated. This marked the end of the Qing Dynasty. China adopted the Gregorian calendar. |
| 1913 | Feb 12 | A New York commission reported that there was widespread violation of child labor laws. |
| 1915 | Feb 12 | Andrew J. Goodpaster, US general, supreme commander (NATO-Europe), was born. |
| 1915 | Feb 12 | Lorne Greene, actor (Bonanza, Battlestar Galactica), was born in Ottawa, Canada. |
| 1915 | Feb 12 | The cornerstone for the Lincoln Memorial was laid in Washington, D.C., a year to the day after groundbreaking. |
| 1918 | Feb 12 | Dominic DiMaggio, baseball outfielder (Boston Red Sox), was born. |
| 1920 | Feb 12 | The last German forces withdrew from Klaipeda as French and English naval forces arrived. |
| 1921 | Feb 12 | Winston Churchill of London was appointed colonial secretary. |
| 1921 | Feb 12 | In Delhi, India, the Duke of Connaught laid the foundation stone of the Parliament building, designed by Herbert Baker. |
| 1921 | Feb 12 | Soviet troops invaded neighboring Georgia. |
| 1924 | Feb 12 | George Gershwin’s groundbreaking symphonic jazz composition “Rhapsody in Blue” premiered at Carnegie Hall with Gershwin himself playing the piano with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. |
| 1924 | Feb 12 | Women were banned from entering the tomb of Tutankhamun which leads to diplomatic problems with Great Britain and America. Carter wrote a pamphlet to document interference by authorities and leaves the excavation and locks the tomb. Pierre Lacau, the French Director of Antiquities, demands the keys and Carter refuses to give them up. |
| 1929 | Feb 12 | Charles Lindbergh announced his engagement to Anne Morrow. The Guggenheims helped aviators like Lindbergh, Curtiss, and the Wright Brothers. Morrow was the daughter of Dwight Morrow, US ambassador to Mexico. She later authored a number of books that included “Gift From the Sea.” |
| 1931 | Feb 12 | Japan’s first television broadcast was a baseball game. |
| 1935 | Feb 12 | The 785-foot USS Macon, the last US Navy dirigible (ZRS-5), crashed on its 55th flight off the coast of California, killing two people. After takeoff from Point Sur, California, a gust of wind tore off the ship’s upper fin, deflating its gas cells and causing the ship to fall into the sea. Two of Macon ‘s 83 crewmen died in the accident. The U.S. Navy lost the airships Shenandoah in 1925 and Akron in 1933. Some considered airships too dangerous for the program to continue at that point, and work on them in the United States halted temporarily. |
| 1936 | Feb 12 | In France more than 4.5 million workers came out on strike; 1 million took to the streets, shutting the country down. |
| 1938 | Feb 12 | German troops entered Austria. |
| 1938 | Feb 12 | Japan refused to reveal naval data requested by the U.S. and Britain. |
| 1940 | Feb 12 | The radio play “The Adventures of Superman” debuted on the Mutual network with Bud Collyer as the Man of Steel. |
| 1940 | Feb 12 | The USSR signed a trade treaty with Germany to aid against the British blockade. |
| 1941 | Feb 12 | Boxers Pat Carroll and Sammy Secreet were unable to continue a slugfest and the referee declared a double KO. The result was soon changed to “No contest.” |
| 1942 | Feb 12 | Painter Grant Wood (b.1892), creator of “American Gothic” (1930), died in Iowa City, Iowa, a day before his 51st birthday. |
| 1942 | Feb 12 | 3 German battle cruisers escaped via Channel to Brest, N. Germany. |
| 1944 | Feb 12 | Wendell Wilkie entered the American presidential race against Franklin D. Roosevelt. |
| 1947 | Feb 12 | A daytime fireball & meteorite fell and was seen in eastern Siberia. |
| 1947 | Feb 12 | A record 100.5-kg sailfish was caught by C.W. Stewart off the Galapagos Islands. |
| 1948 | Feb 12 | 1st Lt. Nancy Leftenant became the 1st black in the army nursing corps. |
| 1949 | Feb 12 | “Annie Get Your Gun” closed at the Imperial Theater in NYC after 1147 performances. |
| 1949 | Feb 12 | Muslim Brotherhood chief Hassan el Banna (b.1906) was shot to death in Cairo. |
| 1950 | Feb 12 | Albert Einstein warned against the hydrogen bomb on US national TV. |
| 1951 | Feb 12 | In Iran Shah Pahlavi married Princess Soraya Esfandiari Bakhtiari (d.2001 at 69). They divorced in 1958. In 1991 Soraya authored her autobiography “Le Palais des Solitudes” (The Palace of Solitudes). |
| 1953 | Feb 12 | An explosion at the Hercules Powder Co. near Pinole, Ca., killed 12 employees. |
| 1953 | Feb 12 | The Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with Israel after the bombing of Soviet legation. |
| 1955 | Feb 12 | President Eisenhower sent 1st US “advisors” to South Vietnam to aid the government under Ngo Dinh Diem. |
| 1957 | Feb 12 | Researchers announced the development of Borazan, a substance harder than diamonds. |
| 1960 | Feb 12 | Bobby Clark (71), vaudevillian (World’s funniest circus clown), died. |
| 1962 | Feb 12 | Pres. Kennedy commuted the death sentence of Jimmie Henderson, a Navy seaman, to confinement for life. |
| 1962 | Feb 12 | A bus boycott started in Macon, Georgia. |
| 1963 | Feb 12 | Argentina asked for the extradition of ex-president Peron. |
| 1964 | Feb 12 | The Beatles played 2 shows at Carnegie Hall. |
| 1966 | Feb 12 | The South Vietnamese won two big battles in the Mekong Delta. |
| 1968 | Feb 12 | “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver (full name: Leroy Eldridge Cleaver), a militant activist and Black Panther, was first published |
| 1970 | Feb 12 | Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller (28) was convicted in Juneau, Alaska, of 2 charges of lewd conduct after being accused of molesting 2 boys. Over the next 35 years he was arrested in 6 more states on molestation charges. In 2005 police in San Jose found notebooks at his home that documented over 36,000 sex acts with young boys. In 2006 a jury in Santa Clara, Ca., convicted Schwartzmiller (64) of molesting 2 San Jose boys. In 2007 he was sentenced to 152 years to life in prison. |
| 1971 | Feb 12 | James Cash Penney (b.1875), US founder of the J.C. Penney stores, died in NYC. His first store, a branch of the Colorado based Golden Rule stores (1902), was in Kemmerer, Wyoming. |
| 1972 | Feb 12 | Senator Kennedy advocated amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters. |
| 1973 | Feb 12 | Operation Homecoming began as the first release of American prisoners of war from the Vietnam conflict took place. |
| 1974 | Feb 12 | The Russian Mars 5 Orbiter entered orbit around Mars and relayed imaging data for the Mars 6 & 7 missions. |
| 1976 | Feb 12 | Sal Mineo (b.1939), American film and theater actor, was stabbed to death in Los Angeles while coming home from a play rehearsal. |
| Â 1979 | Feb 12 | Jean Renoir (b.1894), French actor and director (Rules of the Game), died in Beverly Hills, Ca. His body was returned to France. |
| 1983 | Feb 12 | composer-pianist Eubie Blake, who wrote such songs as “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Memories of You,” died in New York City, five days after turning 100. |
| 1987 | Feb 12 | In Alabama surviving relatives of a black man murdered by KKK members were awarded $7 million in damages. |
| 1987 | Feb 12 | A Court in Texas upheld an $8.5 billion fine imposed on Texaco for the illegal takeover of Getty Oil. |
| 1987 | Feb 12 | Friends of the poet Boris Pasternak and of Russian culture agreed that the 1958 resolution expelling Pasternak from the Writers’ Union had to be rescinded. People met and voted in the same ornate conference room where, thirty years earlier, the great poet had been cast out of the union. |
| 1988 | Feb 12 | Alexander M. Haig dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. |
| 1988 | Feb 12 | The Pentagon charged that two Soviet Navy vessels deliberately bumped two U.S. warships in the Black Sea as the American vessels sailed through waters claimed by the Soviet Union. |
| 1989 | Feb 12 | In Ohio the body of Joy Stewart (22) was found raped and fatally stabbed in Preble County. She was eight months pregnant at the time. Dennis McGuire was later convicted and sentenced to death. On Jan 16, 2014, McGuire (53) was executed by a new combination of lethal drugs. The process took nearly 25 minutes from injection to death and left him gasping for air in the final minutes. |
| 1989 | Feb 12 | In Pakistan 5 Moslem rioters were killed in Islamabad protesting the “Satanic Verses” novel. |
| 1990 | Feb 12 | President Bush rejected Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s new initiative for troop reductions in Europe, but predicted a “major success” on arms control at the superpower summit in June. |
| 1990 | Feb 12 | Robert Ouko (b.1931), Kenya’s foreign minister and member of the Luo tribe, was murdered during his investigation of corruption charges against the government. |
| 1991 | Feb 12 | Iraqi President Saddam Hussein met with Soviet envoy Yevgeny Primakov, who brought with him a message from President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. |
| 1991 | Feb 12 | In China, two longtime democracy activists (Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming) were sentenced to 13 years in prison. Both were later freed. |
| 1991 | Feb 12 | Former New York City Mayor Robert Wagner died at age 80. |
| 1992 | Feb 12 | President Bush formally announced his bid for re-election. |
| 1992 | Feb 12 | Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton released a letter he’d written as a student in 1969 in which he said he had decided to give up a draft deferment in order to “maintain my political viability.” |
| 1993 | Feb 12 | In a crime that shocked Britons, two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, lured 2-year-old James Bulger from his mother at a shopping mall in Liverpool, England, then beat him to death and left his battered body on a railway track. The 2 boys were later sentenced to serve 8 years in prison. The sentence was later increased to 10 years and then 15 years. After 8 years in a reformatory, Thompson and Venables were released in 2001, after a parole board found they no longer posed a danger to the public. |
| 1994 | Feb 12 | President Clinton signed an $8.6 billion relief package for victims of the Jan 17 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. |
| 1994 | Feb 12 | The XVII Winter Olympic Games opened in Lillehammer, Norway. The official song was “Fire in Your Heart.” |
| 1995 | Feb 12 | Jurors in the O.J. Simpson murder trial toured the scene where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been slain, then visited the estate of the former football star. |
| 1996 | Feb 12 | Bob Dole eked out a victory in Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses, while Pat Buchanan came in a surprisingly strong second. |
| 1997 | Feb 12 | The Clinton administration gave permission to 10 U.S. news organizations to open bureaus in Cuba. |
| 1998 | Feb 12 | US federal district judge T. Hogan struck down Pres. Clinton’s new Line-Item Veto Act as unconstitutional. |
| 1999 | Feb 12 | Pres. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate 55-45 on a perjury charge and 50-50 on an obstruction of justice charge. He once again apologized for burdening the nation with his conduct. Clinton told Americans he was “profoundly sorry” for what he had said and done in the Monica Lewinsky affair that triggered the impeachment drama. |
| 2000 | Feb 12 | Michelle Kwan won her third straight US Figure Skating Championships crown, while Michael Weiss successfully defended the men’s title. |
| 2001 | Feb 12 | A federal appeals court upheld a decision against Napster and ruled that the online music service violated copyright laws. |
| 2001 | Feb 12 | Scientists published their first examinations of nearly all the human genetic code. |
| 2002 | Feb 12 | The International Skating Union announced it would conduct an “internal assessment” of the Olympic judging that gave the Russians the pairs figure skating gold medal over the Canadians. |
| 2002 | Feb 12 | An Iran Air Tours Tupelov Tu-154 crashed into the Sefid Kouh mountains near Khorramabad killing all 119 on board. |
| 2003 | Feb 12 | Kemmons Wilson (90), founder of the Holiday Inn chain, died in Memphis, Tenn. |
| 2004 | Feb 12 | Behrooz Sarshar, an Iranian emigre in his mid-sixties and former FBI translator, stated he was forced to retire from the FBI (in November 2002) after a two-and-a-half year OPR investigation in which he was accused of talking about FBI matters with non-FBI people. |
| 2005 | Feb 12 | Howard Dean (b.1948), former Vermont governor and presidential candidate, was elected chairman of the Democratic Party. |
| 2006 | Feb 12 | Bomb blasts and shootings killed at least three people in Baghdad and north of the Iraqi capital, including an Education Ministry official and an elderly woman. At least 22 people were wounded. |
| 2007 | Feb 12 | Russian military prosecutors pledged to investigate allegations that young conscripts were forced into prostitution by fellow soldiers, the latest claim of rampant abuse in the nation’s armed forces. |
| 2007 | Feb 12 | Zimbabwe’s central statistics office reported that the inflation rate, already the highest in the world, had soared again by more than 300 points to 1,593% in January. |
| 2008 | Feb 12 | US Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson and 6 major lenders announced a new initiative to help seriously delinquent homeowners stave off foreclosure. |
| 2008 | Feb 12 | South Africa’s security minister announced that the government is dissolving an elite graft-busting unit set up by prosecutors, in the latest twist in a struggle between South Africa’s crime-fighting agencies. |
| 2008 | Feb 12 | South Korea held its first-ever trial by jury as part of reform measures aimed at increasing confidence in the judicial system. A nine-member jury in Daegu heard the case of a man (27) accused of assaulting a woman (70) while trying to burglarize her house. By South Korean law, the findings of jury are nonbinding, with the final verdict still resting in the hands of a judge, as in the past. Juries will be used at the request of defendants in some criminal cases. |
| 2009 | Feb 12 | Ed Grothus (b.1923), owner of the Black Hole “nuclear waste” junk store in Los Alamos, NM, died. The former Manhattan Project machinist began collecting rejected equipment from the weapons lab at Los Alamos in 1969 and in 1972 established his Omega Peace Institute at a former Lutheran church, which later became his First Church of High Technology. |
| 2009 | Feb 12 | Mexican federal police arrested 10 alleged members of a hit squad working for the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, who had come to Mexico City to start a turf war with a rival cartel. |
| 2009 | Feb 12 | Pakistan’s government said for the first time that last November’s attack on Mumbai was launched and partly planned from Pakistan, and it was holding in custody a ringleader and five other suspects. |
| 2010 | Feb 12 | In Oregon Jeffrey Grahn (46), an off-duty sheriff’s sergeant, shot and killed his wife and another woman before fatally shooting himself at a bar in Gresham. |
| 2010 | Feb 12 | In Pennsylvania Max Ray Vision, formerly Max Ray Butler, of San Francisco was sentenced to 13 years in prison and ordered to pay $27.5 million to the banks and credit card companies that he victimized. In 2009 Butler (36) had identified himself in court as “Max Vision,” the name he gave himself in the 1990s when he became a superstar in the computer security community. |
| Â 2011 | Feb 12 | Activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, selected Texas Rep. Ron Paul as their top choice for the 2012 presidential nomination. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mit Romney finished a strong second. |
| 2012 | Feb 12 | The 54th Grammy Awards were held in Los Angeles. British singer Adele won every award she was up for including Album of the year for “21″ and Record of the year for “Rolling in the Deep.” |
| 2013 | Feb 12 | President Obama made his State of the Union address. He announced plans with the EU to pursue talks aimed at achieving an overarching trans-Atlantic free trade deal. Obama also said that the first 34,000 troops will leave Afghanistan within a year and more in 2014, when all foreign combat forces are to leave the country |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | In Bangladesh a mortar shell exploded accidentally during firing practice at a military training base, killing five military and border guard personnel and injuring 14 others. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | In Brazil some 15,000 landless peasants demanding land reform engaged police in Brasilia. At least 32 people were injured. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | British police searched a home in the southeastern town of Crawley as part of an investigation into reports that a man named as Abdul Waheed Majid (41) was responsible for a suicide attack in Syria. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) arrested Sudhir Choudhri, an Indian-born donor to one of Britain’s ruling political parties, and his son as part of an investigation into Rolls-Royce’s dealings in Asia. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Flooded communities in Britain faced a fresh battering from storms and high winds as emergency efforts in stricken areas picked up following criticism of a sluggish response. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | China’s Cabinet announced that 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) has been set aside this year to reward cities and regions that make significant progress in controlling air pollution, highlighting how the issue has become a priority for the leadership. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Amnesty International said the exodus of tens of thousands of Muslims from Central African Republic amounts to “ethnic cleansing.” French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian pledged on a visit to CAR to continue disarming both Muslim and Christian fighters. African Union peacekeepers uncovered a mass grave at a military camp in Bangui occupied by the Muslim Seleka rebels. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | In China a strong and shallow 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the far western region of Xinjiang, but in a sparsely populated area. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | CongoDRC Pres. Joseph Kabila, announced an amnesty for former members of the defeated M23 rebel army. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | A municipal planning committee advanced a plan to build a Jewish seminary in the heart of an Arab neighborhood of east Jerusalem, triggering angry Palestinian accusations that Israel was undermining already troubled Mideast peace efforts. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Italy’s constitutional court struck down a drug law that tripled sentences for selling, cultivating or possessing cannabis and which has been blamed for causing prison overcrowding. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | In Kenya 70 men arrested during a raid on a mosque in the port city of Mombasa were formally charged with being members of Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab rebels. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Lebanon’s army arrested Naim Abbas, a senior al Qaeda-linked militant, described by security sources as a “mastermind of car bombs” that targeted Shi’ite areas of the country. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Niger police detained three journalists from the Anfani private radio station as well as a union leader who criticized President Mahamadou Issfouou on air. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Nigeria said it would open a probe into claims of state-sponsored killings dating back to the era of military rule, raising hopes that perpetrators will finally be brought to book. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Russian geologist Yevgeny Vitishko, a leading activist who campaigned against environmental damage caused by preparations for the Winter Olympics, was sentenced to three years in a penal colony. A court in Krasnodar converted a 2012 suspended sentence to a prison term. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | South African police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades at supporters of the ruling ANC party who attacked an opposition rally in Johannesburg, amid escalating tensions ahead of a crunch general election. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | Syrian government forces and fighters from Lebanese ally Hezbollah pounded Syria’s strategic border town of Yabroud in apparent preparation for a new offensive to flush out rebels. At least 51 people were reportedly killed in Aleppo, mainly by barrel bombs dropped on eight rebel-held districts from helicopters. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | UN leader Ban Ki-moon condemned what he said was the use of cluster bombs in the war in South Sudan. |
| 2014 | Feb 12 | In Venezuela 3 people were killed in Caracas as protests against Pres. Maduro turned violent. Armed members of a pro-government vigilante arrived on motorcycles and began shooting at more than 100 anti-Maduro student protesters clashing with security forces. |
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