On this day: Nissan LEAF, world’s first mass-market electric car, launches in 2010

Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 3:

1912 – Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro signed an armistice ending the first Balkan War.

1919 – French Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir died.

1984 – A gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant near Bhopal, India, killed at least 3,000 people and disabled thousands.

1989 – The leader of East Germany’s Communist Party, Egon Krenz, and the entire party hierarchy voted themselves out of office.

1993 – Britain’s Princess Diana said she was bowing out of the public spotlight because she wanted privacy and time to herself.

1996 – Former Afghan communist leader Babrak Karmal, who personified the Kremlin’s ill-fated 9-year intervention in Afghanistan, died in Moscow.

1999 – A Croatian court ruled that ailing president Franjo Tudjman was unfit to rule, and handed power to parliamentary speaker Vlatko Pavletic.

2000 – Australian cricket team set a new world record with 12 consecutive test wins.

2004 – Pakistan and India agreed to reopen a rail link severed nearly 40 years earlier between Munabao in Rajasthan state and Khokrapar in southern Pakistan.

2009 – Explosion at Hotel Shamo in Mogadishu kills at least 14 people.

2010 – Nissan launches the world’s first electric car to be mass marketed.

(Reuters)