QUOTE OF THE DAY

BIRTHS

Giovanni Cenni (1881-14.3.1953), an Italian Master.
Kidambi Sundararajan (1982), an Indian Grandmaster.
Igor Kovalenko (1988), a Latvian Grandmaster born in Ukraine who won the Latvian Chess Championship in 2013 and 2014.

DEATHS

Endre Steiner (27.06.1901-1944) a Hungarian Master who won thrice team gold medal (1927, 1928, 1936) at the Olympiads. He died in a Nazi concentration camp in the last months of the WWII.
Kurt Richter (24.11.1900-1969), a German International Master, author, and editor.
Jean Oudot (11.12.1926-1974), a French chess composer.
Brian Patrick Reilly (12.12.1901-1991), He was Irish Master and the General Editor of British Chess Magazine who was Irish Champion in 1959 and 1960. He represented Ireland in nine Olympic chess team tournaments between 1935 and 1968. He was General Editor of “British Chess Magazine” from 1949 to 1981.
Wolfgang Pietzsch (21.12.1930)1996), a German Grandmaster who was the Champion of the German Democratic Republic in 1960, 1962 and 1967.

CHESS EVENTS

1979 Wong Meng Kong (SIN) won the Asian Junior Championship in Sivakasi, India.
1997 The match between A. Galliamova (RUS) and Xie Jun (CHN) finished 1:2 at the Women’s Candidates Tournament organized in Groningen.
1997 V. Anand (IND) defeated M. Adams (ENG) 5-4 in the Challenger Final of the World Championship and qualified to play A. Karpov (RUS) in the final in Lausanne.

WORLD EVENTS

1800 Charles Goodyear (d.1860), inventor of vulcanized rubber for tires, was born.
1911 Mongolia gains independence from the Qing dynasty, enthroning 9th Jebtsundamba Khutughtu as Khagan of Mongolia.
1913  The 1st movie serial, “Adventures of Kathlyn,” premiered in Chicago.
1916  According to the New Style calendar (Dec. 16th by the Old Style), Grigory Rasputin, the so-called “Mad Monk” who had wielded great influence with Czar Nicholas II, was murdered by a group of Russian noblemen in St. Petersburg.
1937  Ireland’s new constitution came into force. The Irish Free State became Eire.
1948 Tito declared Yugoslavia would follow its own Communist line.
1952  The 1st transistorized hearing aid was offered for sale at Elmsford, NY.
1967  A Turkish-Cypriot government formed in Cyprus.
1984 Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi claimed victory in parliamentary elections
1989 Czech writer, philosopher and dissident Václav Havel is elected the first post-communist President of Czechoslovakia.
1992 Fernando Collor de Mello, president of Brazil, tries to resign amidst corruption charges, but is then impeached.
1995 The CNN financial network was launched by Turner Enterprises.
1996 Guatemala and leaders of Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity sign a peace accord ending a 36-year civil war.
1998 Two top Khmer Rouge leaders apologized for the deaths of as many as 2 million people during their regime in the 1970s, and asked Cambodians to forget the past.
2005 In Croatia Slobodan Davidovic (52), an ethnic Serb seen killing Muslims in a nationally televised video, was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 15 years in prison, with the judge saying he had shown “no mercy or compassion” for his victims.

(Source: Wikipedia and timeline)

THE GAME OF THE DAY