Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 14

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 * 835 – In the Sweet Dew incident, Emperor Wenzong (pictured) of the Tang dynasty conspired to kill the powerful eunuchs of the Tang court, but the plot was foiled.
 * 1863 – American Civil War: The Battle of Bean's Station, the final battle of the Knoxville campaign, was fought in Grainger County, Tennessee.
 * 1911 – Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first people to reach the South Pole.
 * 1918 – The first British general election with female voters took place, with women over the age of thirty permitted to vote.
 * 1918 – Giacomo Puccini's comic opera Gianni Schicchi premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
 * 1948 – American physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann were awarded a patent for their cathode-ray tube amusement device, the first interactive electronic game.
 * 1960 – Australian cricketer Ian Meckiff was run out on the last day of the first Test match between Australia and the West Indies, resulting in the first tied Test in cricket history.
 * 1962 – NASA's Mariner 2 became the world's first spacecraft to successfully conduct a planetary encounter when it flew by Venus.
 * 1963 – The dam containing the Baldwin Hills Reservoir in Los Angeles failed, releasing a flood that killed five people and destroyed 277 homes.
 * 1972 - Upon completing the third extra-vehicular activity of Apollo 17, American astronaut Gene Cernan became the last person to date to walk on the Moon.
 * 1981 – The Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli "laws, jurisdiction and administration" to the Golan Heights, effectively annexing the territory internationally recognized as part of Syria.
 * 1992 – War in Abkhazia: A helicopter carrying evacuees was shot down during the siege of Tkvarcheli, resulting in at least 52 deaths and catalysing more concerted Russian military intervention on behalf of Abkhazia.
 * 1998 – Kosovo War: Yugoslav forces ambushed a group of Kosovo Liberation Army militants attempting to smuggle weapons into Yugoslavia from Albania.
 * 1999 – Torrential rains caused flash floods in the Venezuelan state of Vargas, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the complete collapse of the state's infrastructure.
 * 2009 – The tino rangatiratanga flag, representing the Māori people, was officially recognized by the government of New Zealand.
 * 2012 – A 20-year-old gunman shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
 * 2012 – A 20-year-old gunman shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
 * Born/died: | Aldfrith of Northumbria |d.or|704; 705| Niccolò Perotti |d|1480|  Giovanni Battista Cipriani |d|1785| Louis Marshall |b|1856| Princess Alice of the United Kingdom |d|1878| DeFord Bailey |b|1899| Lupe Vélez |d|1944| Kim Beazley |b|1948 | KaDee Strickland |b|1975| Michael Owen |b|1979

December 14: Martyred Intellectuals Day in Bangladesh (1971)


 * 1650 – English domestic servant Anne Greene survived being hanged for infanticide.
 * 1836 – The Toledo War, a mostly bloodless territorial dispute between Ohio and the Michigan Territory, was unofficially ended with a resolution passed by the controversial "Frostbitten Convention".
 * 1913 – Haruna (pictured), the fourth and last Japanese battlecruiser of the Kongō class, was launched and went on to serve in both world wars.
 * 2008 – During a press conference in Baghdad, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at U.S. president George W. Bush and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, yelling "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq".