Mexican politician who served for 10 days as governor of the state of Puebla before being killed in a helicopter crash after her inauguration; in Tecamachalco, Puebla (died 2018) Died: Patrick Hadley, 74, British classical music composer December 18, 1973 (Tuesday) The Soviet Union launched Soyuz 12 into orbit as the first crewed mission to be tracked by the new RKA Mission Control Center, based in the Moscow suburb of Kaliningrad (now Korolyov in Russia). The launch marked the first time in Earth spaceflight that American astronauts (Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Edward Gibson on Skylab 4) and Soviet cosmonauts (Pyotr Klimuk and Valentin Lebedev on Soyuz 12) were in outer space at the same time. An unprecedented five people would be in orbit over the next eight days until the return of Soyuz 12 to Earth on December 26. The Soviet mission carried the Orion 2 Space Observatory. Having seized a Lufthansa airplane in Rome and murdering one hostage, Palestinian terrorists ordered the crew to fly to Athens, and then to Damascus and Kuwait, where the five hijackers released their 12 hostages and were allowed to leave the plane. More than a year later, the hijackers were turned over by Kuwait to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had promised to put the group on trial for carrying out an "unauthorized operation". Their subsequent fate remains unknown. The Islamic Development Bank was created as a specialized agency of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, effective August 12, 1974. December 19, 1973 (Wednesday) All 40 crew died when the Oriental Monarch, a Liberian-registered cargo ship, foundered in the north Pacific Ocean, off the coast of British Columbia. All 109 people aboard a Lufthansa jetliner were able to escape alive after the Boeing 707 crashed at New Delhi and burst into flames. Ten people had minor injuries. A group of 2,261 delegates in Thailand gathered at the Royal Turf Club, a horseracing track in Bangkok, to select 299 of their group to serve in a constitutional assembly. All of the delegates had been picked by King Bhumibol Adulyadej "with careful attention paid to making it a representative cross-section of prince-to-peasant among Thailand's 34 million people." The track's parimutuel computer, normally used to calculate wagers and returns, identified the 299 candidates who received the most votes. Ten railway commuters were killed and 94 injured when the train they were on derailed in the