This Day in History - December 12

1787 - Pennsylvania becomes the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1913 - Authorities in Florence, Italy, announce that the Mona Lisa, stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1911, has been recovered.
1917 - During World War I, a train carrying some 1,000 French troops from the Italian front derails while descending a steep hill in Modane; at least half of the soldiers are killed in France’s greatest rail disaster.
1917 - The Rev. Edward Flanagan finds Boys Town outside Omaha, Neb.
1946 - A United Nations committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the site of the U.N.’s headquarters.
1977 - “Saturday Night Fever,” starring John Travolta, premieres in New York City.
1995 - By three votes, the Senate kills a constitutional amendment giving Congress authority to outlaw flag burning and other forms of desecration against Old Glory.
1997 - Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” goes on trial in Paris on charges of killing two French investigators and a Lebanese national. (Ramirez would be convicted and is serving a life prison sentence.)
2000 - George W. Bush becomes president-elect as a divided U.S. Supreme Court reverses a state court decision for recounts in Florida’s contested election.
2003 - Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger is knighted by Britain.
2003 - Keiko, the killer whale made famous by the “Free Willy” movies, dies in the Norwegian fjord that he’d made his home.