This Day in History: Kenya became an independent state within the Commonwealth

Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 12:

1913 – Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting “Mona Lisa” was recovered in Florence two years after it had been stolen from the Louvre in Paris.

1939 – Douglas Fairbanks senior died. A swashbuckling silent film actor, he co-founded the United Artists studio with Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin.

1963 – Kenya became an independent state within the Commonwealth with Jomo Kenyatta as prime minister; it became a republic on this day in 1964 with Kenyatta as president.

1993 – Eduardo Frei swept to victory in Chile’s presidential elections, the first since military rule ended in 1990.

1996 – President Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt in Baghdad.

2000 – Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace agreement in Algiers ending a two-year border war that cost tens of thousands of lives.

2003 – Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien retires from politics after 40 years as a parliamentarian including 10 years as Prime Minister.

2003 – Former Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev, who dominated Azerbaijani politics for more than 30 years, died. He was 80.

2004 – Mahmoud Abbas, on the first visit to Kuwait by a top Palestinian official since Iraq’s 1990 invasion, apologised to his hosts for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s failure to condemn the attack.

2006 – Emmy-winning actor Peter Boyle, who played the tap-dancing monster in the movie “Young Frankenstein” and grouchy father Frank Barone in the TV series “Everybody Loves Raymond”, died.

2007 – The U.N. war crimes tribunal sentenced former Bosnian Serb general Dragomir Milosevic to 33 years imprisonment for ordering the deadly shelling of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. More than 10,000 people were killed in the Muslim-held part of Sarajevo in fighting and sniper attacks during the conflict.

(Reuters)