Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 4:
1943 – General Tito named as head of provisional Communist government in Yugoslavia.
1976 – The English composer Benjamin Britten died. He was famed for his operas including “Peter Grimes”, “Billy Budd” and “Death in Venice”, as well as his War Requiem.
1977 – Jean Bedel Bokassa crowned himself emperor of the Central African Empire.
1991 – The American journalist Terry Anderson, the Western hostage held longest by Islamic militants in Lebanon, was freed after 2,454 days. He had been seized on March 16, 1985.
1997 – A historic treaty to ban anti-personnel landmines worldwide became reality when 121 nations signed it in Ottawa; the United States was among the abstainers.
1998 – The last Khmer Rouge fighters surrendered, ending a 20-year war against the Cambodian government.
1998 – Space shuttle Endeavour lifts off at the Kennedy Space Center carrying the “Unity” module for International Space Station.
2000 – Henck Arron, who led Suriname to independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and became its first premier, died.
2005 – Carl Verheijen of the Netherlands sets new world record in 10,000m speed skating race.
2015 – A Molotov cocktail thrown at a Cairo restaurant kills 16 people.
2017 – Thomas Fire begins in California, quickly pushing across thousands of acres and becoming the state’s largest wildfire in history.
(Reuters)