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The 1962 South Vietnamese Independence Palace bombing in Saigon was an aerial attack on February 27, 1962, by two dissident Vietnam Air Force pilots, Second Lieutenant Nguyễn Văn Cử and First Lieutenant Phạm Phú Quốc. The pilots targeted the Independence Palace, the official residence of the President of South Vietnam, with the aim of assassinating President Ngô Đình Diệm and his immediate family, who acted as his political advisors. Three palace staff died and another 30 were injured, but the Ngô family were largely unscathed. One bomb penetrated a room where Diệm was reading but it failed to detonate, leading the president to claim that he had "divine protection". Cử and Quốc later stated that their assassination attempt was made in response to Diệm's autocratic rule, in which he focused more on staying in power than on confronting the Vietcong. They hoped that the airstrike would expose Diệm's vulnerability and trigger a general uprising, but this failed to materialise. After the bombing, Cử escaped to Cambodia, but Quốc was arrested and imprisoned, and Diệm grew hostile towards the American presence in South Vietnam. Diệm claimed that the American media was seeking to bring him down and he introduced new restrictions on press freedom and political association. Domestically, the incident reportedly increased plotting against Diệm by his officers. (more...)

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December 15

• 1256 – The Hashshashin stronghold at Alamut (pictured) in present-day Iran was captured and destroyed by Hulagu Khan and the Mongols.
• 1791 – The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, collectively known as the Bill of Rights, were ratified.
• 1906 – The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, a 14.17-kilometre (8.80 mi) deep-level underground tube railway connecting Hammersmith and Finsbury Park in London, opened.
• 1973 – The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders, the DSM-II.
• 1995 – The European Court of Justice handed down the Bosman ruling, allowing footballers in the European Union to freely transfer from one UEFA Federation to another at the end of their contracts.

More anniversaries: December 14 – December 15 – December 16