Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is Jan. 12. In another step in what seemed an endless quest for Middle East peace, the United Nations Security Council, on this date in 1976, voted 11-1 to allow Yasser Arafat's PLO send a delegate to join the U.N. debate on Middle East issues. The United States cast the only dissenting vote. Advertisement In the 1970s, Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, tried to get Israel and the Arabs to talk peace, but with the Soviet Union backing the Arabs the United States tended to side with Israel. It was bigger than NAFTA on this date in 1828, when boundary disputes were settled between the United States and Mexico. The agreement, however, did not settle the boundary where it is today. The Gadsden Purchase came later. That was the deal that bought southern Arizona from Mexico so the United States would control the entire route of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Otherwise, Nogales and Tucson might be in Mexico today. It was on this date in 1971 that a federal grand jury indicted the radical Rev. Philip Berrigan and five other people, including a nun and two priests, on charges of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger. The plot had nothing to do with the Middle East. Berrigan's band opposed the Vietnam War and Kissinger was the most prominent member of the Nixon administration other than the president himself. Advertisement Two of the four female cadets who enrolled in The Citadel the previous fall after the South Carolina military school lost its fight to keep women out, resigned on this date in 1997. The cadets said they had been assaulted and sexually harassed. This was not a very meaty day in 1943, when the wartime Office of Price Administration announced that soy meal would be mixed into hotdogs to save on scarce meat. The resulting franks were called "Victory Sausages." We now return you to the present, already in progress.
