Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is Dec. 12. The Korean War formally ended on this date in 1991 -- 38 years after the fighting ceased -- when North and South Korea signed a treaty of reconciliation and non-aggression. The historic pact included a pledge to eventually reunify. Advertisement Poland's Communist leaders decided enough was enough on this date in 1981 and declared martial law. Among other things, Solidarity Labor Union leader Lech Walesa was thrown in prison, where he would remain for 11 months. The Eastern European nation had given unprecedented freedom to Walesa and Solidarity -- founded in August 1980, in the Baltic port city of Gdansk -- but that ended on Dec. 12, 1981. Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina was sworn in as the first black to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives on this date in 1870. Rainey had been appointed to fill a vacancy left by the death of a congressman. He served until March 1879. It was on this date in 1985 that an Arrow Air DC-8 military charter crashed on takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing all 256 aboard, including 248 U.S. soldiers. Advertisement Five years later, in 1990, 15 people were killed and more than 260 injured in a pileup on a foggy Tennessee highway. Princess Anne, the only daughter of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, became the first divorced royal in the inner circle to remarry on this date in 1992 when she wed Cmdr. Timothy Laurence. And it was on this date in 1901 that a radio message was transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. We now return you to the present, already in progress.
