What a Good Idea To Cap Inflation and Why It Matters
The shattered remains of 'Clipper of the Seas', an Pan-Am 747 airliner on the ground near Lockerbie, Scotland, after being ripped apart in midair. The devastating terrorist attack had lasting consequences security for the global airline industry.
Image: History.uk.tv
Did you know?
The critically endangered African Penguin (formerly the Jackass Penguin), found on South Africa’s coast, is the only penguin species that breeds in Africa.
On this day in history, December 21
1846 Anaesthesia is used for the first time during an operation at London’s University College Hospital by Robert Liston, who amputates the leg of a servant.
1879 Soviet leader Josef Stalin is born, as Iosif Dzhugashvili, in the village of Gori in Georgia.
1913 The first crossword puzzle (with 32 clues) is printed in the New York World.
1933 Fox Films signs Shirley Temple aged 5, to a studio contract.
1945 Flamboyant US General George Patton dies in Germany following a car accident. Buried in Luxembourg, ‘Old Blood and Guts’ once stated during the war, ‘We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again.’
1967 Louis Washkansky, the first person in the world to have a human-to-human heart transplant, dies in Cape Town, 18 days after the transplant.
1979 The Lancaster House Agreement – an independence agreement for Rhodesia – is signed in London by Lord Carrington, Sir Ian Gilmour, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and SC Mundawarara.
1982 At the end of a 44-day inquest into the death in detention of the trade union leader Neil Aggett, the magistrate finds no one to blame. The verdict is greeted with astonishment and anger.
1988 Pan American Flight 103 explodes in midair when a terrorist bomb goes off, and it crashes into the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew, along with 11 people on the ground, are killed.
1988 The biggest plane in the world, the Antonov An-225 Mriya, makes its first flight. It is later destroyed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
1989 New Zealand is the first country to set a formal inflation target (0-2%) for how much prices should rise each year. Most developed countries adopt similar targets.
1990 Cricketing brothers Steve and Mark Waugh score 464 runs for New South Wales against Western Australia.
2012 Psy’s Gangnam Style becomes the first video to reach one billion views on YouTube.
2021 Major breakthrough in development of nuclear fission energy when experiment produces 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at JET Laboratory in the UK.