Australian History
Saturday, December 15, 1810. : Governor Lachlan Macquarie introduces a building code into the New South Wales colony.
Lachlan Macquarie was born on 31 January 1762 on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides islands of Scotland. He joined the army at age 14 and gained experience in North America, India and Egypt. In 1808, he was appointed Governor of the New South Wales colony, a position he held from 1810 to 1821. With his military training and vision for organisation and discipline, Macquarie was an ideal candidate to restore order to the colony, following the Rum Rebellion against deposed Governor William Bligh.
On 15 December 1810, Macquarie introduced the first building code into the colony. The code required that all buildings were to be constructed of timber or brick, covered with a shingle roof, and include a chimney. Whilst Governor, Macquarie also ordered the construction of roads, bridges, wharves, churches and public buildings. Following an inspection of the sprawling, ramshackle settlement of Hobart Town in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, Macquarie ordered government surveyor John Meehan to survey a regular street layout: this layout still forms the current centre of the city of Hobart.
Australian History
Monday, December 15, 2014. : Sydney, Australia, is gripped by a siege that lasts almost 17 hours and leaves three dead.
Martin Place in the Sydney CBD is a popular plaza for both workers and visitors. It incorporates a range of commercial and retail businesses, as well as an amphitheatre utilised for corporate and community events, and is usually a bustling thoroughfare. On the morning of 15 December 2014, this peaceful and previously safe venue became the scene of a terrifying siege which lasted into the early hours of the following day.
At around 9:45am, 50-year-old Iranian cleric Man Haron Monis, who had been granted political asylum in Australia, entered the Lindt Chocolat Café in Martin Place. All people inside were taken hostage. After some were seen with their arms in the air, the CBD went into lockdown. Workers in surrounding buildings were ordered to evacuate, while a 150m exclusion zone was established around the cafe with specialist police outside the shop. During the course of the day, five hostages managed to escape, but at that stage it was not known how many remained inside. Several of the hostages were seen being made to hold a black flag with Arabic writing against a window, in a move which caused the world to fear it was an Islamic terrorist attack. The flag contained the Muslim testimony of faith. The gunman ordered his hostages to deliver his list of demands, but at the request of police, newspapers declined to publish these demands. The demands were later revealed to be the provision of an Islamic State flag, for the media to describe it as an Islamic State attack upon Australia, and a conversation with the Prime Minister. The demands were denied as experienced negotiators recognised they could lead to public execution of one or more hostages.
It transpired that Monis was out on bail for numerous violent offences, including being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife, and had been accused of sending offensive letters to the families of deceased Australian soldiers. Although he forced his hostages to wave an Islamic flag used by terrorist organisations, he acted alone and Muslim leaders in Australia condemned his actions. The siege came to an end when armed police stormed the building about 2:00am the following morning after hearing shouting and shots from inside. Two hostages were killed, Lindt cafe manager Tori Johnson, 34, who tried to wrestle the firearm from the gunman, and Sydney lawyer Katrina Dawson, 38, who shielded her pregnant friend, while several others were injured. The gunman also died.
World History
Friday, December 15, 1961. : Adolf Eichmann, ‘Chief Executioner of the Third Reich’, is sentenced to death for his war crimes.
Adolf Eichmann was a member of the Austrian Nazi party in World War II. After his promotion to the Gestapo’s Jewish section, he was essentially responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the war. He is often referred to as the ‘Chief Executioner’ of the Third Reich.
Eichmann escaped from a prison camp after US troops captured him at the close of the war. Wanting to avoid having to face the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal, Eichmann fled to Argentina which was safely harbouring a number of Nazi war criminals. After his location was tipped off to authorities, agents from Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, were deployed to Argentina, where they captured Eichmann.
Eichmann’s trial in front of an Israeli court in Jerusalem started on 11 April 1961. He faced fifteen criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and war crimes. As part of Israeli criminal procedure, his trial was presided over by three judges instead of a jury, all of which were refugees from the Nazi regime in Germany. Eichmann was protected by a bulletproof glass booth and guarded by two men whose families had not suffered directly at the hands of the Nazis. Eichmann was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death on 15 December 1961. He was hanged a few minutes after midnight on 1 June 1962 at Ramla prison, the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel.
World History
Friday, December 15, 2000. : The infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is permanently shut down.
Chernobyl is a city in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus. It is located 14.5 kilometres south by south-east of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which is notorious for the Chernobyl accident of 26 April 1986. Regarded as the worst accident in the history of nuclear power, clouds of radioactive particles were released, and the severely damaged containment vessel started leaking radioactive matter. 31 people died, 28 of them from acute radiation exposure. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were evacuated from the city and other affected areas, but because there was no containment building, a plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, UK, and the eastern United States.
The incident began with a steam explosion that resulted in a fire, a series of additional explosions, and the subsequent nuclear meltdown. Blame for the accident has been attributed to a combination of error by the power plant operators, and flaws in the reactor design, specifically the control rods. Health officials predicted that in the next 70 years there would be a 2% increase in cancer rates in much of the population which was exposed to the radioactive contamination released from the reactor.
Following the 1986 accident, individual reactors at Chernobyl were gradually shut down. A fire caused one to be shut down in 1991, while another was deactivated in 1996. On 15 December 2000, the final nuclear reactor was taken offline, completing the permanent shut down of Chernobyl.
Chernobyl remains inhabited by a small number of residents who chose to return to their homes after the accident, but most of the evacuated population now lives in specially constructed towns.
World History
Saturday, December 15, 2001. : The Leaning Tower of Pisa is reopened after extensive restoration work to correct too much lean.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the bell tower, or campanile, of the cathedral in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli (field of Miracles). The tower took nearly 200 years to complete, being finished in 1372. Shortly after its construction began, it started to list to one side. The tower was seriously in danger of toppling completely by 1964, when the Italian government sought aid and advice in preserving its famous icon. Following decades of consultation and preparatory efforts, the tower was closed to the public in January 1990, remaining closed until December 2001 while corrective reconstruction and stabilisation work was implemented. The excessive lean of the tower was corrected by removing 38 cubic metres of soil from underneath the raised end: it is expected to remain stable for another 300 years. The Tower reopened for the first time in almost twelve years on 15 December 2001.