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Milestones

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December 9 is the anniversary of "Pennsylvania's Roswell," an alleged UFO crash. It is also when a legendary general suffered a fatal car accident; and when another legendary general enjoyed one of his greatest triumphs. Even though they were born centuries apart, one of them believed they could have been comrades-in-arms.
480. Odoacer, first Germanic king of Italy, occupies Dalmatia and establishes his political power with the co-operation of the Roman Senate. Flavius Odoacer was a barbarian soldier, who after 476 became the first barbarian King of Italy. His reign is commonly seen as marking the end of the Western Roman Empire. Though the real power in Italy was in his hands, he represented himself as the client of Julius Nepos and, after Nepos' death in 480, of the Emperor in Constantinople. Odoacer generally used the Roman honorific patrician, granted by the Emperor Zeno, but is referred to as a king (Latin rex) in many documents.

536. Byzantine General Belisarius enters Rome while the Ostrogothic garrison leaves peacefully, returning the old capital to its empire.
Flavius Belisarius was one of the greatest generals of the Byzantine Empire and one of the most acclaimed generals in history. He was instrumental to Emperor Justinian I's ambitious project of reconquering much of the Western Roman Empire, which had been lost about a hundred years earlier. Although less well-known than other famed military leaders such as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, his skills and accomplishments were matched by few, if any, other military commanders.
730. At the Battle of Marj Ardabil: the Khazars annihilate an Umayyad army and kill its commander, al-Djarrah ibn Abdullah. The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus (Circassia, Dagestan), parts of Georgia, the Crimea, and northeastern Turkey.
After fighting the Arabs to a standstill in the North Caucasus, Khazars became increasingly interested in replacing their Tengri shamanism with a state religion that would give them equal religious standing with their Abrahamic neighbors. During the 8th century, the Khazar royalty and much of the aristocracy converted to Judaism. Khazar kings tolerated those who had different religions letting Greek Christians, pagan Slavs, and Muslim Iranians live in their domains. In the capital city, a supreme court was established composed of 7 members, and every religion was represented on this judicial panel. Khazars were judged according to the Torah, while the other tribes were judged according to their own laws.

1531. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin reportedly witnesses the first apparition of the Virgin Mary on Tepeyac Hill in Mexico, remembered as "Our Lady of Guadalupe."
1608. Poet John Milton is born in London. Milton was a poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost.
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The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Satan is the first major character introduced in the poem. Formerly the most beautiful of all angels in Heaven, he's a tragic figure best described by the now-famous quote "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven". He is introduced to Hell after he leads a failed rebellion to wrestle control of Heaven from God. Paradise Lost is widely considered one of the greatest literary works in the English language.
1775. The Virginia and North Carolina militias defeat 800 slaves and 200 redcoats serving John Murray, earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, at Great Bridge outside Norfolk, ending British royal control of Virginia during the American Revolution. The Tory survivors retreated first to Norfolk then to Dunmore's ship, the Otter, where the majority died of smallpox.

1793. New York City's first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, is established by Noah Webster.
1824. Patriot forces led by General Antonio José de Sucre defeat a Royalist army in the Battle of Ayacucho, putting an end to the Peruvian War of Independence.
1835. The Republic of Texas captures San Antonio.
1854. The poem The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is published in England.

1872. Republican P. B. S. Pinchback becomes governor of Louisiana, and the first serving African-American governor of a U.S. state. During the Civil War, Pinchback traveled to Louisiana and became the only African-American captain in the Union-controlled 1st Louisiana Native Guards. In 1868 he was elected as a Louisiana state senator, where he became the state Senate president pro tempore. He became acting lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn, the first elected African-American lieutenant governor of a U.S. state. Pinchback was elevated to the Louisiana governorship upon the impeachment and removal from office of his predecessor, Republican governor Henry Clay Warmoth, for political corruption and for allegedly "stealing" the governor's office from the Democrat John McEnery.
Not until 1990 did L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the second African-American to serve as a state governor (and the first to be elected to the office). Deval Patrick of Massachusetts became the third (the second to be elected) when he took office in January 2007. Both Wilder and Patrick were elected as Democrats.
1875. The Massachusetts Rifle Association, "America's Oldest Active Gun Club", is founded.

1905. France passes a law separating church and state.
1907. Christmas seals go on sale for the first time, at the Wilmington, Delaware, post office. The proceeds go to fight tuberculosis.
1911. A mine explosion near Briceville, Tennessee, kills 84 miners in spite of rescue efforts led by the United States Bureau of Mines. Over the years, large amounts of volatile coal dust had accumulated in the mine's shafts. On the morning of December 9, 1911, a roof fall occurred near one of the mine's entrances, which released methane gas into the air. The gas and coal dust probably ignited when a miner approached the roof fall with an open light. The explosion killed or trapped the 89 miners who had gone into the mine that morning.
1917. In World War I, British Field Marshal Edmund Allenby captures Jerusalem.
1921. A young engineer at General Motors named Thomas Midgeley Jr. discovers that when he adds a compound called tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline, he eliminates the unpleasant noises (known as "knock" or "pinging") that internal-combustion engines make when they run. Midgeley could scarcely have imagined the consequences of his discovery: For more than five decades, oil companies would saturate the gasoline they sold with lead -- a deadly poison.
1935. Walter Liggett, American newspaper editor and muckraker, is killed in gangland murder. Liggett was a crusading newspaper editor in the Minnesota of the 1930s. Founder of the newspaper Midwest American, he specialized in articles about Minneapolis and Saint Paul organized crime and their political connections.
Soon after alleging links between the criminal syndicate of Kid Cann and the administration of Minnesota Governor Floyd B. Olson, Liggett was beaten up, prosecuted on trumped-up kidnapping and sodomy charges (and acquitted), and finally died after being machine gunned in the alley behind his apartment on December 9, 1935, in view of his wife and two children. His murder remains unsolved.

1937. Japanese troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Asaka Yasuhiko launch an assault on the Chinese city of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a prelude to World War II. The Battle of Nanjing (often called Nanking) leads to the Nanking Massacre, one of the worst mass atrocities of the 21st Century.
The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as "The Rape of Nanking." was carried out by Japanese troops in and around the city, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the period of carnage lasted well into the next six weeks, until early February 1938.
During the occupation of Nanjing, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of civilians and prisoners of war. Although the executions began under the pretext of eliminating Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians, a large number of innocent men were wrongfully identified as enemy combatants and killed, or simply killed because they were Chinese as the massacre gathered momentum. A large number of women and children were also killed, as rape and murder became more widespread.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East stated that 20,000 (and perhaps up to 80,000) women were raped -- their ages ranging from infants to the elderly (as old as 80). Rapes were often performed in public during the day, sometimes in front of spouses or family members. A large number of them were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were then killed immediately after the rape, often by mutilation. According to some accounts, other women were forced into military prostitution as "comfort women."
1941. In World War II, the Republic of China, Cuba, Guatemala, the Republic of Korea, and the Philippine Commonwealth declare war on Germany and Japan.

1945. American General George S. Patton is injured in an automobile crash in occupied Germany, a day before he was due to return to the United States. He dies twelve days later.
It was a cold, wet, hazy December morning. Patton's 1939 Cadillac Model 75 was driven by PFC Horace Woodring. Patton sat in the back seat. At 11:45 near Neckarstadt, (Käfertal), a 2.5 ton truck driven by T/5 Robert L. Thompson appeared out of the haze and made a left-hand turn towards a side road. The Cadillac smashed into the truck. General Patton was thrown forward and his head struck a metal part of the partition between the front and back seats. Paralyzed from the neck down, George Patton died of an embolism on 21st December 1945 at the military hospital in Heidelberg, Germany with his wife present.
Patton had once said: "The two most dangerous weapons the Germans have are our own armored halftrack and jeep. The halftrack because the boys in it go all heroic, thinking they are in a tank. The jeep because we have so many God-awful drivers."
A believer in reincarnation, Patton was convinced he had invaded Germany in a previous lifetime as a Roman Legionary. The conviction resulted from the deja vu he experienced traveling through the countryside.

1950. Harry Gold is sentenced to thirty years in prison for helping Klaus Fuchs pass information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. His testimony is later instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in the electric chair.

1953. General Electric announces that all Communist employees will be discharged from the company.

1958. The John Birch Society is founded in the United States. The society was an outgrowth of the "Red Scare" of the era, organized to fight what it saw as growing threats to the Constitution of the United States, especially a perceived Communist infiltration, and to support free enterprise. It promotes a conspiracy theory of history and has been marginalized within the conservative movement since the 1960s, due in large part to its founder's assertion that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent.
It was named after John Birch, a United States military intelligence officer and Baptist missionary in World War II who was killed in 1945 by armed supporters of the Communist Party of China, and whom the JBS describes as "the first American victim of the Cold War." His parents joined the society as life members.
1961. The trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel ends with verdicts of guilty on 15 criminal charges, including charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership of an outlawed organization.
1962. The Petrified Forest National Park is established in Arizona.
1965. The Kecksburg UFO incident takes place in Pennsylvania. A large, brilliant fireball was seen by thousands in at least six states and Ontario, Canada. It streaked over the Detroit, Michigan/Windsor, Ontario area, dropped reported metal debris over Michigan and northern Ohio, and caused sonic booms in western Pennsylvania. It was generally assumed and reported by the press to be a meteor.
However, eyewitnesses in the small village of Kecksburg, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, claimed something crashed in the woods. A boy said he saw the object land; his mother saw a wisp of blue smoke arising from the woods and alerted authorities. Others from Kecksburg, including local volunteer fire department members, reported finding an object in the shape of an acorn and as large as a Volkswagen Beetle. Writing resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics was also said to be in a band around the base of the object. Witnesses further reported that the military secured the area, ordered civilians out, and then removed the object on a flatbed truck. At the time, however, the military claimed they searched the woods and found nothing.
The nearby Greensburg Tribune-Review had a reporter at the scene; the headline in the newspaper the next day was "Unidentified Flying Object Falls near Kecksburg -- Army Ropes off Area."
The official explanation of the widely-seen fireball was a mid-sized meteor, however, speculation as to what the Kecksburg object was range from it being an alien craft to the remains of an unmanned Soviet Venera 4 atmospheric probe, also known as Kosmos-96, originally destined for Venus. However, this was recently ruled out by NASA's chief in charge of tracking orbital debris.
Similarities have been drawn between Kecksburg and the Roswell UFO incident, and as such, is known as "Pennsylvania's Roswell".
1971. The United Arab Emirates join the United Nations.
1972. I Am Woman by Helen Reddy tops the U.S. pop charts.
1979. The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first and to date only human disease driven to extinction.1982. Activist Norman Mayer threatens to blow up the Washington Monument, before being killed by United States Park Police.
1987. In the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, the first riots of the Palestinian intifada, or "shaking off" in Arabic, begin one day after an Israeli truck crashed into a station wagon carrying Palestinian workers in the Jabalya refugee district of Gaza, killing four and injuring 10. Gaza Palestinians saw the incident as a deliberate act of retaliation against the killing of a Jew in Gaza several days before, and on December 9 they took to the streets in protest, burning tires and throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli police and troops. At Jabalya, an Israeli army patrol car fired on Palestinian attackers, killing a 17-year-old and wounding 16 others. The next day, crack Israeli paratroopers were sent into Gaza to quell the violence, and riots spread to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
1989. American model and beauty queen Lindsey Gayle Evans is born.
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She was selected as the Playboy Playmate of the Month for October 2009. She is a former pageant titleholder from Blanchard, Louisiana who held the Miss Louisiana Teen USA 2008 and competed in the Miss Teen USA 2008 pageant. (See pictures.)
1990. Lech Walesa becomes the first popularly elected president of Poland. Walesa successfully led the mostly peaceful revolution that ended communist dictatorship in Poland but, as is often the case with revolutionary leaders, he was not nearly as skilled at governance.

1992. Buckingham Palace announces the separation of Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, confirming rumors that the fairy tale match was on the rocks.

2003. A blast in the center of Moscow kills six people and wounds at least 11.
2008. The Governor of Illinois, Rob Blagojevich, is arrested by federal officials for a number of alleged crimes including attempting to sell the United States Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama's election to the Presidency. On December 7, 2011, Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
2010. Panama experiences its heaviest ever rains, with the Panama Canal shut for the first time due to weather. Millions of people are affected across the region, and there are deaths, including in Colombia and Venezuela.
2011. Joshua Komisarjevsky, found guilty of the Cheshire, Connecticut home invasion murders, is sentenced to death by lethal injection. The murders occurred on July 23, 2007, when a mother and her two daughters were raped and murdered during a home invasion. Connecticut repealed capital punishment in 2012, although the law allows executions to proceed for those still on death row and convicted under the previous law.
and some beauties
 

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The modern reading of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" doesn't capture the drama, sound and rhythm​
like Tennyson himself - listen (very carefully!) to him on an Edison wax-cylinder recording, 1890:​
 
On December 10 a British monarch gave up the throne, a U.S. president racked up one of his many "firsts," and the UN passed a declaration that an American ambassador later described as a "letter to Santa Claus."
220. Cao Pi forces Emperor Xian of Han to abdicate the Han Dynasty throne. The Cao Wei empire is established and the Three Kingdoms period begins. The Three Kingdoms period was a tumultuous chapter in Chinese history, part of an era of disunity called the "Six Dynasties" immediately following the loss of de facto power of the Han Dynasty.
1041. Empress Zoe of Byzantium elevates her adopted son to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire as Michael V. Michael V was Byzantine emperor for four months in 1041–1042, as the nephew and successor of Michael IV and the adoptive son of his wife, the Empress Zoe.
Determined to rule on his own, Michael V came into conflict with his uncle John the Orphanotrophos, whom he almost immediately banished to a monastery. Michael now reversed his uncle's decisions, and recalled the nobles and courtiers who had been exiled during the previous reign, including the general George Maniakes. Maniakes was promptly sent back to Southern Italy in order to contain the advance of the Normans.
On the night of 18 April to 19 April 1042 Michael V also banished his adoptive mother and co-ruler Zoe as well, becoming the sole Emperor. His announcement of the event in the morning led to a popular revolt; the palace was surrounded by the mob, which demanded Zoe's immediate restoration. The demand was met, and Zoe was brought back as joint-ruler with her sister Theodora. On 20 April 1042 Theodora declared the emperor deposed, and he fled to seek safety in the monastery of the Stoudion together with his remaining uncle. Although he had taken monastic vows, Michael was arrested, blinded, and castrated. He died as a monk on 24 August 1042.

1508. The League of Cambrai is formed by Pope Julius II, Louis XII of France, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Ferdinand II of Aragon as an alliance against Venice.
Pope Julius II had intended that the war would curb Venetian influence in northern Italy, and had, to this end, created the League of Cambrai (named after Cambrai, where the negotiations took place), an alliance against the Republic. Although the League was initially successful, friction between Julius and Louis caused it to collapse by 1510; Julius then allied himself with Venice against France.
The Veneto-Papal alliance eventually expanded into the Holy League, which drove the French from Italy in 1512. Disagreements about the division of the spoils, however, led Venice to abandon the alliance in favor of one with France. Under the leadership of Francis I, who had succeeded Louis to the throne, the French and Venetians would, through their victory at Marignano in 1515, regain the territory they had lost; the treaties of Noyon and Brussels, which ended the war the next year, would essentially return the map of Italy to the status quo of 1508.

1520. Martin Luther burns his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine outside Wittenberg's Elster Gate. The document was essential a papal ultimatem to recant or face excommunication. In burning it, Luther burned his bridges.
1665. The Royal Netherlands Marine Corps is founded by Michiel de Ruyter
1778. John Jay, the former chief justice of the New York Supreme Court, is elected president of the Continental Congress. Despite his early misgivings about independence, Jay served as president of the Continental Congress from 1778 to 1779 and in 1782 signed the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain. He contributed to the The Federalist Papers, part of the successful campaign waged by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to win ratification for the Constitution in 1788 and 1789. Soon after, President George Washington appointed Jay as the first chief justice of the United States. Jay also served as governor of New York from 1797 to 1801, when he retired from public life.
1799. France adopts the metre as its official unit of length. Many different units of length have been used around the world. The main units in modern use are U.S. customary units in the United States and the Metric system elsewhere. British Imperial units are still used for some purposes in the United Kingdom and some other countries.

1817. The Mississippi Territory is admitted to the Union as the 20th U.S. state.

1864. During the American Civil War, Major General William T. Sherman's Union Army troops reach Savannah, Georgia.
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Sherman's armies reached the outskirts of Savannah on December 10, but found that Confederate defenders had entrenched 10,000 men in strong positions and had flooded the surrounding rice fields, leaving only narrow causeways available to approach the city. Sherman was blocked from linking up with the U.S. Navy as he had planned, so he dispatched cavalry to Fort McAllister, guarding the Ogeechee River, in hopes of unblocking his route and obtaining supplies awaiting him on the Navy ships. On December 13, William B. Havens division of Howard's army stormed the fort in the Battle of Fort McAllister and captured it within 15 minutes. Some of the 134 Union casualties were caused by torpedoes, a name for crude land mines that were used only rarely in the war.
After taking the city, Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." (See picture.)
Sherman's scorched earth policies have always been highly controversial, and Sherman's memory has long been reviled by many natives of Georgia, but slaves, many of whom left their plantations to follow his armies, welcomed him as a liberator. The March to the Sea is considered by many historians to have hastened the end of the conflict, which remains the bloodiest war in American history.

1868. The first traffic lights are installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Resembling railway signals, they use semaphore arms and are illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps.
1884. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published for the first time.

1898. The Treaty of Paris is signed, officially ending the Spanish-American War. Under the terms of the treaty, Spain grants Cuba independence and cedes Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States.
1901. The first Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The ceremony came on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other high explosives. In his will, Nobel directed that the bulk of his vast fortune be placed in a fund in which the interest would be "annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Although Nobel offered no public reason for his creation of the prizes, it is widely believed that he did so out of moral regret over the increasingly lethal uses of his inventions in war.

1906. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize of any kind. The Roosevelt Administration is marked by many "firsts."
In the sphere of race relations, Booker T. Washington became the first black man to dine at the White House in 1901. (Frederick Douglas was the first African American to be received at the White House, by Abraham Lincoln, but did not eat there, evidently.)
Oscar S. Straus became the first Jew appointed as a Cabinet Secretary, under Roosevelt.
In 1902, in response to the assassination of President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to be under constant Secret Service protection.
Roosevelt was the first President to wear a necktie for his official portrait, a tradition which all of his successors followed.
Although four Vice Presidents before Roosevelt had succeeded to the presidency upon the death of their predecessor, Roosevelt, in 1904, became the first to be elected in his own right or even win his party's nomination for reelection. After Roosevelt, three more Vice Presidents who succeeded to the Presidency would be elected to full terms (Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson). (George H. W. Bush was also elected in his own right but not as the result of his predecessor's death.)
In 1906, Roosevelt became the first American to be awarded a Nobel Prize because of his efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War. That same year, he made the first trip, by a President, outside the United States, visiting Panama to inspect the construction progress of the Panama Canal on November 9.
Roosevelt was also the first president to appreciate the power and influence of the press and formally invited the press into the White House on a permanent basis.
He was also first to be submerged in a submarine, to own a car, to have a telephone in his home, and to be allowed to operate the light switches in the White House (electricity wasn't trusted at the turn of the century and the President used to have an assistant flip the switches for him).
1907. The worst night of the Brown Dog riots takes place in London, when 1,000 medical students clash with 400 police officers over the existence of a memorial for animals who have been vivisected. The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London had performed illegal dissection before an audience of 60 medical students on a brown terrier dog -- adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team; conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists.
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque -- "Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?" -- leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers." On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots.
1911. The first transcontinental flight across the United States is completed. Calbraith Perry Rodgers began the flight on 17 September 1911, taking off from Sheepshead Bay New York. He landed in Long Beach, California, 49 days later.
1915. The one millionth Ford car rolls off the assembly line at the River Rouge plant in Detroit.
1927. The phrase "Grand Ole Opry" is used for the first time on-air. The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly country music stage concert in Nashville, Tennessee, that has presented the biggest stars of that genre since 1925. It is also among the longest-running broadcasts in history since its beginnings as a one-hour radio "barn dance" on WSM-AM.

1936. Britain's King Edward VIII signs his Instrument of Abdication. In 1936, a constitutional crisis in the British Empire was caused by King-Emperor Edward VIII's proposal to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite.
The marriage was opposed by the King's governments in the United Kingdom and the autonomous Dominions of the British Commonwealth. Religious, legal, political, and moral objections were raised. Mrs Simpson was perceived to be an unsuitable consort because of her two failed marriages, and it was widely assumed by the Establishment that she was driven by love of money or position rather than love for the King. Despite the opposition, Edward declared that he loved Mrs Simpson and intended to marry her whether the governments approved or not.
The widespread unwillingness to accept Mrs Simpson as the King's consort, and the King's refusal to give her up, led to Edward's abdication in December 1936. He remains the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the throne since the Anglo-Saxon period. He was succeeded by his brother Albert, who took the regnal name George VI. Edward was given the title His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor following his abdication, and he married Mrs Simpson the following year. They remained married until his death 35 years later.
1941. During World War II, the Royal Navy capital ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse are sunk by Imperial Japanese Navy torpedo bombers. On the same day, Imperial Japanese forces under the command of General Masaharu Homma land on the Philippine mainland.
1948. The UN General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Right, which isn't worth the paper it's printed on. As it was conceived as a statement of objectives to be followed by governments, it is not legally binding and there were therefore no signatories. The declaration does not form part of international law.
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick criticized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calling it "a letter to Santa Claus."
Predominantly Muslim countries, like Sudan, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, frequently criticized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for its perceived failure to take into account the cultural and religious context of non-Western countries. In 1981, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, articulated the position of his country regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by saying that the UDHR was "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition," which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law.

1952. Actress Susan Dey is born as Susan Hallock Dey in Pekin, Illinois. She is best known for her roles on The Partridge Family and L.A. Law. Susan was a model before starring as Laurie Partridge in the television series The Partridge Family from 1970–1974. She was only 17 years old when she won the part, and had no previous acting experience.
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After the end of the television series, Dey strove to shed her wholesome image by shedding her clothes.. She took movie roles where she was required to appear nude or semi-nude; in Echo Park, for example, she was forcibly stripped. (See pictures.) The new image did not significantly help her career, however, and she remained little in demand for movie roles. Dey felt that she had become too typecast, and to this day she refuses to talk about her days on The Partridge Family or to participate in reunion shows.
Dey seemed to be attempting a comeback with her appearance in 1981's sexy thriller Looker, but after this high-profile movie she nearly disappeared from the public eye until her starring role in the TV series L.A. Law as Grace Van Owen. She was critically hailed for her part in this role. She earned a Golden Globe Award as "Actress In A Leading Role -- Drama Series" for this role in 1987.
1958. The first domestic passenger jet flight takes place in the United States as a National Airlines Boeing 707 flies 111 passengers from New York City to Miami.
1965. The Grateful Dead play their first concert, at the Fillmore in San Francisco.
1967. A plane crash in Madison, Wisconsin, kills soul singer Otis Redding and members of the Bar-Kays band. The plane crashed into Lake Monona, several miles from the Madison airport.. Four months after his death at the age of 26, Otis Redding's Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay, the last song he ever recorded, reached the top spot on the pop music charts. It was his first No. 1 hit.
1974. Representative Wilbur D. Mills, a Democrat from Arkansas, resigns as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the aftermath of the first truly public sex scandal in American politics. On October 7, 1974, at 2 a.m., Mills was stopped by Washington park police while driving at night with his lights off. The 65-year-old representative, an influential congressman and married man, was visibly intoxicated, his face was scratched, and his companion, 38-year-old Annabell Battistella, had bruised eyes. Battistella then proceeded to jump into the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson Memorial and had to be pulled out by the police. She was later identified as a popular stripper who went by the names "Fanne Foxe" and the "Argentine Firecracker."
Congressmen had been involved in these types of improprieties before but the details were generally kept quiet, saving the politicians from public disgrace. However, on this occasion, the story of Representative Mills' sordid affair with the stripper was heavily publicized. At first, Mills denied all the allegations but later admitted he had joined a party Battistella was present at after "a few refreshments." Mills was subsequently reelected to Congress, but because of the escalating scandal, he was forced to retire his chairmanship and later announced that he would not run for reelection.
1978. Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and President of Egypt Anwar Sadat are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1980. Rep. John W. Jenrette, D-SC, resigns to avoid being expelled from the House following his conviction on charges related to the FBI's Abscam investigation.

1983. Democracy is restored in Argentina with the assumption of President Raúl Alfonsín.

1989. Tsakhiagiyn Elbegdorj announces the establishment of Mongolia's democratic movement that peacefully changed the second oldest communist country into a democratic society.
2007. Cristina Fernandez is sworn in as Argentina's first elected female president.
2010. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron criticizes the "mob" which launched an attack upon the car of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall as the couple were driven down Regent Street towards a Royal Variety performance in London the previous night. Protesters claim police brutality.
2011. A day of protests begins in cities across Russia against alleged election fraud by Vladimir Xyulo - wanted by criminal international court in The Hague and his United Russia party, with fifty thousand people marching in Moscow and 25 people arrested in Khabarovsk. Meanwhile, the Syrian government gives the city of Homs 72 hours to stop anti-government protests, or face an offensive, raising fears of a massacre against civilians.

Elsewhere, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake hits the Mexican state of Guerrero. It causes three deaths and is felt across several central states.
Astronomers in Asia, Australia and North America observe a total lunar eclipse. It was the second of two total lunar eclipses in 2011, the first having occurred on June 15. A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is positioned just right in its orbit to pass through Earth's shadow. Asia, Australia, and other areas of the Pacific had the best visibility. European countries only saw a partial eclipse of a rising moon, while northwestern North America saw a partial eclipse of a setting moon.
and even a Ariel in Milestone
 

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Dec 10th: Eulalia of Mérida (Emerita Augusta, in Extremadura in SW Spain), virgin martyr (c304) YAY!:D

Whether E of Mérida is different from Eulalia of Barcelona (Feb 12th) is an argument I shan't get into, it's just nice to have 2 name-days. As far as I'm concerned, this one's the real Eulalia, a cheeky tomboy, the classic troublesome teenager. I took her as "my" saint as soon as I first read about her, at about the same age as she was, in a book belonging to my "churchy" great-aunt.

When the persecution ordered by Diocletian got under way, Governor Dacian in Hispania being a particularly enthusiastic virgin-martyriser, her parents put her in a safe house in the mountains to try to keep her out of trouble, but she was having none of that - she escaped, made her way back to town and harangued the magistrate. She was dealt with according to routine procedures - less elaborate than the Barcelona version, but enlivened by the her cheeky "jokes" as she was being tortured:

> She was scourged, and thanked her Torturers for "writing the praises of God" on her skin - purple ink on calfskin was reserved for sycophantic addresses to the Emperor;
> She was torn with hooks, presumably having been stretched on the eculeus, Little Horse, a kind of Rack, and thanked her Torturers for "carving the Cross of Christ" on her breasts;
> She was roasted with burning braziers - didn't crack any more jokes, but shook her long hair so it caught fire and ended her suffering;
> Her body was then tossed out on the forum pavement as a warning to others, but a snow shower from the mountains hid her, as a white dove flew away bearing her spirit to Heaven.

The idea of a girl like I was then, being scourged, racked, torn with hooks and roasted to death while she went on being spunky and cheeky to her Tormentors filled me with delight - great kid, I love her!

Lots of artists have pictured her martyrdom since quite soon after it happened. J W Waterhouse's painting is the best-known, I think his preliminary sketch is interesting, I wish he'd kept closer to his original ideas.

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Dec 10th: Eulalia of Mérida (Emerita Augusta, in Extremadura in SW Spain), virgin martyr (c304) YAY!:D
The idea of a girl like I was then, being scourged, racked, torn with hooks and roasted to death while she went on being spunky and cheeky to her Tormentors filled me with delight -
great kid, I love her!

Lots of artists have pictured her martyrdom since quite soon after it happened. J W Waterhouse's painting is the best-known, I think his preliminary sketch is interesting, I wish he'd kept closer to his original ideas.

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congratulations dear virgin eulalia
 
In Ancient Rome, December 11 was the Septimontium, a festival of the seven hills of Rome. Romans sacrificed seven times in seven different places within the walls of the city near the seven hills. During the Septimontium in the Republican period, Romans refrained from operating horse-drawn carriages.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, it is Tango Day, celebrating a dance that began in 19th Century brothels and developed an international following. And in Wales, December 11 is the Day of Remembrance for Llwelyn ap Gruffydd, the last Welsh Prince of Wales.
361. Julian the Apostate becomes sole Emperor of the Roman Empire, he rules from Constantinople and tries to restore paganism. Julian was a man of unusually complex character: he was "the military commander, the theosophist, the social reformer, and the man of letters." He was the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire and it was his desire to bring the Empire back to its ancient Roman values in order to save it from "dissolution." He purged the top-heavy state bureaucracy and attempted to revive traditional Roman religious practices at the cost of Christianity. His rejection of Christianity in favor of Neoplatonic paganism caused him to be called Julian the Apostate by the church. He was the last emperor of the Constantinian dynasty, the empire's first Christian dynasty. In 363, Julian embarked on an ambitious campaign against the Sassanid Empire. Though initially successful, Julian was mortally wounded in battle and died shortly after.
969. Byzatine Emperor Nikephoros II is assassinated by his wife Theofano and her lover, the later Emperor John I Tzimiskes. Nikephoros II's brilliant military exploits contributed to the resurgence of the Byzantine Empire in the tenth century.
With unrest mounting around him, his second wife Theophano took as her lover Nikephoros II's nephew and general John Tzimiskes. Theophano and Tzimiskes would meet in secret and plot Nikephoros' death, with the plot eventually growing to include others. On a blustery night, the conspirators went into the palace dressed as women. Nikephoros was warned that assassins were in the palace, and demanded the palace be searched. The guards however left the empresses' room unsearched, and the assassins avoided capture.
Later, when Nikephorus was asleep on the floor before the holy icons, Tzimiskes and the others sneaked into his bed chamber, alarmed at first to find the bed empty (Nikephoros frequently slept on the floor). Aroused by the noise, Nikephoros rose just as one of the assassins swung his sword in an attempt to decapitate him. It struck him in the face, and he was then dragged to the foot of the bed. His head was cut off and paraded on a spike, while his body was thrown out the window. He was buried at the Church of the Holy Apostles, while John Tzimiskes became Emperor John I. An inscription carved on the side of his tomb reads: "You conquered all but a woman".
1282. Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. the last native Prince of Wales, is killed at Cilmeri, near Builth Wells, south Wales. He was the last prince of an independent Wales before its conquest by King Edward I of England. Some would say he was the penultimate, but in effect he was the last ruler. In Welsh, he is remembered by the alliterative sobriquet Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf (Llywelyn, Our Last Leader). Accounts differ on the circumstances of his death but agree that his head was severed posthumously and paraded as a trophy through the streets of London.

1602. A surprise attack by forces under the command of the Duke of Savoy and his brother-in-law, Philip III of Spain, is repelled by the citizens of Geneva. (This actually takes place after midnight, in the early morning of December 12, but commemorations/celebrations onFête de l'Escalade are usually held on December 11 or the closest weekend.)
1777. During the American Revolution, General George Washington begins marching 12,000 soldiers of his Continental Army from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for the winter. As Washington's men began crossing the Schuylkill River, they were surprised by a regiment of several thousand British troops led by General Charles Cornwallis. Cornwallis came across the continental forces by chance as he followed General William Howe's orders to forage for supplies in the hills outside Philadelphia.
Upon spotting General Cornwallis and the British troops, General Washington ordered his soldiers to retreat across the Schuylkill River, where they destroyed the bridge to prevent the British from pursuing them. After engaging the British for a short time from the opposite side of the river, Washington and the Continental Army retreated back to Whitemarsh, delaying their march to Valley Forge for several days.
1789. The University of North Carolina is chartered by the North Carolina General Assembly.

1792. During the French Revolution, King Louis XVI is put on trial for treason by the National Convention. Louis was convicted and sentenced to death by 361 votes to 288, with 72 effective abstentions.
Stripped of all titles and honorifics by the egalitarian, Republican government, Citizen Louis Capet was guillotined in front of a cheering crowd on January 21, 1793. It took two attempts to sever his head; his neck was too thick to yield to one blow.
1815. U.S. President James Madison (1809-1817) presents to Congress a trade agreement with Great Britain that would regulate commerce between the two countries. The agreement came just one year after the signing of the treaty that ended the War of 1812. The commerce agreement secured America's autonomy on the high seas, but more importantly, it signified Britain's acceptance of America as a separate nation with the will and capacity to defend its interests.
1816. Indiana becomes the 19th U.S. state.
1868. Brazilians defeat Paraguayans at the Battle of Avaí during the War of the Triple Alliance. The war was fought from 1864 to 1870 between Paraguay and the Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. It caused more deaths proportionally than any other war in modern history, and particularly devastated Paraguay, killing most of its male population.

1872. P.B.S. Pinchback is sworn in as the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
1907. The New Zealand Parliament Buildings are almost completely destroyed by fire.
1915. The first president of the new Chinese republic, Yuan Shih-kai, who had come to power in the wake of revolution in 1911 and the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912, accepts the title of emperor of China. The return to monarchy was met by such strong opposition within and outside of China that Yuan was quickly forced to return the country to the republican form of government. He died in 1916.
1917. Lithuania declares its independence from Russia.
1927. The Guangzhou Uprising take place in China. Communist militia and worker red guards launch an uprising in Guangzhou, taking over most of the city and announcing the formation of a Guangzhou Soviet.
1937. Italy resigns from the League of Nations during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, had long held a desire for an Italian Empire, reminiscent of the Roman Empire, to rule over the Mediterranean. The United Kingdom and France both had large empires at the time and some other European countries had colonial possessions.
Abyssinia was a prime candidate of this expansionist goal for several reasons. It was one of the few African nations that wasn't a European colony, and it would serve to unify the Italian-held Eritrea to the northwest and Italian Somaliland to the east. It was considered to be militarily weak, and rich in resources. It has been suggested that the Italians attacked Abyssinia to "reclaim" the country and to avenge their defeat during the First Italo-Abyssinian War in 1896.
1941. During World War II, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States. Nazi Germany declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. This allowed German submarines in the Atlantic to attack American convoys that had been supporting the United Kingdom; and although Nazi hubris is often cited, Hitler presumably sought the further support of Japan, chiefly for an invasion of the Soviet Union. He was convinced of the United States' aggressive intentions following the leaking of "Rainbow Five" and hearing of the foreboding content of Franklin Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech. Before then, Germany had practiced its own policy of appeasement, taking drastic precautions in order to avoid the United States' entry into the war.
A series of color-coded war plans were developed by the U.S. Army during the 1920s to outline potential strategies for a variety of hypothetical war scenarios. All of these plans were officially withdrawn in 1939, in favor of five Rainbow Plans developed to meet the threat of a two ocean war against multiple Axis Powers.
The best-known of these plans (although they were secret at the time) is probably War Plan Orange, a plan for war with Japan, which formed some of the basis for the actual campaign against Japan in World War II which included the huge economic blockade from mainland China.
War Plan Red, a more hypothetical plan for war against Britain and Canada, caused a stir in American-Canadian relations when declassified in 1974. A related plan was War Plan Crimson, which envisioned a limited war with the British Empire concentrating on an invasion of Canada. Though the possibility of a war between the United States and Great Britain diminished greatly after World War I, the plan was kept updated as late as the 1930s. (There was concern in Washington that if Britain fell to the Axis during World War II, American forces would have to occupy Canada.)
1942. American actress Donna Mills (see photos) is born as Donna Jean Miller in Chicago, Illinois.
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She first gained prominence as ex-nun Laura Donnelly on the soap opera Love is a Many Splendored Thing in the 1960s, before playing Michele Lee's unpopular sister-in-law Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing Sumner on Knots Landing, for almost a decade. Upon leaving the series she played opposite Clint Eastwood inPlay Misty for Me, her most famous movie role to date.
She returned for the series finale in 1993 and the reunion movie Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac in 1997. She has also appeared inThe Six Million Dollar Man, The Love Boat, CHiPs, Quincy, M.E., Thriller, Fantasy Island and Melrose Place.
In November 2002, Camille Paglia asserted in an Interview magazine interview with Mills that the character of Sandy in Grease was based on Mills' experiences as a Chicago-area teen, even though no interview questions covered the subject.
1944. The city of Toronto, Canada, is battered with its worst-ever snowfall. Twenty-one people died as a result of the record storm, in which nearly 20 inches of snow fell in a single day.
1958. French Upper Volta gains self-government from France, becomes the Republic of Upper Volta, and joins the French Community.
1962. Arthur Lucas, convicted of murder, is the last person to be executed in Canada. Arthur Lucas, originally from the U.S. state of Georgia, was one of the two last people to be executed in Canada, on December 11, 1962. Lucas had been convicted of the murder of an undercover narcotics agent from Detroit. The murder took place in Toronto. Lucas, along with fellow prisoner Ronald Turpin was executed at the Toronto (Don) Jail by hanging, the only form of capital punishment ever used in post-Confederation Canada. In 1976, capital punishment for murder was removed from Canada's Criminal Code, but could still be used under the National Defence Act until 1998. When both men were informed that they would likely be the last people ever to hang in Canada, Lucas said, "Some consolation".
1962. The New York City Board of Estimate unanimously votes against a plan for a $100 million elevated expressway across the bottom of Manhattan. The road, known as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had been in the works since 1941. It was supposed to link the Holland Tunnel on the city's West Side with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges on the east side, slicing right through the neighborhoods now known as TriBeCa and SoHo.
1964. An unknown terrorist fires a mortar shell at the United Nations building in New York City during a speech by Che Guevara.
1971. The Libertarian Party of the United States is founded. It has become one of the largest continuing third parties in the United States, claiming more than 200,000 registered voters and more than 600 people in public office, including mayors, county executives, county council members, school board members and other local officials. It has had more people in office than all other third parties combined, including seats in the New Hampshire and Alaska state legislatures.
The platform of the Libertarian Party favors minimally regulated, laissez-faire markets, and strong civil liberties. Among outside political watchers, some consider Libertarians to be conservative (primarily because of their support of the right to bear arms and because of their views on taxes and states' rights); while others consider them liberal because of their advocacy of a non-interventionist foreign policy, the repeal of drug prohibition, and the elimination of laws that interfere with private consensual acts (such as prostitution and gambling). In reality, Libertarians are neither conservative nor liberal; rather, they represent a unique philosophy that is all their own.
In 1987, Doug Anderson, a bartender for a topless bar, became the first Libertarian elected to office in a major city, elected to the Denver Election Commission. Later, in 2005, Anderson was elected to the Lakewood, Colorado city council.
1972. Apollo 17 becomes the sixth and last Apollo mission to land on the Moon.
1980. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, also known as CERCLA or Superfund, is enacted by the U.S. Congress.
1981. The El Mozote Massacre takes place as Salvadoran armed forces kill an estimated 900 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign during the country's civil war.
On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion arrived at the remote village of El Mozote after a clash with guerrillas in the vicinity. Upon arrival, the soldiers found not only the residents of the village but also campesinos who had sought refuge from the surrounding area. The soldiers ordered everyone out of their houses and into the square. They made them lie face down, searched them, and questioned them about the guerrillas. They then ordered the villagers to lock themselves in their houses until the next day, warning that anyone coming out would be shot. The soldiers remained in the village during the night.
Early the next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire village in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked them in separate groups in the church, the convent, and various houses. During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture, and execute the men in several locations. Around noon, they began taking the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the church and its convent were shot through the windows. After killing the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.
1993. Forty-eight people are killed when a block of the Highland Towers collapses near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
1994. A bomb assembled by Ramzi Yousef explodes on Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman.
2005. The Cronulla riots break out in Australia as thousands of white Australians demonstrate against ethnic violence resulting in a riot against anyone thought to be Lebanese in Cronulla Sydney.
On Sunday, approximately 5000 people had gathered in a protest to "reclaim the beach" from recently reported incidents of assaults and intimidating behavior by groups of non-locals, most of whom were identified in the earlier media reports as Middle Eastern youths from the suburbs of Western Sydney. The crowd had assembled following a widely reported series of earlier confrontations, and an assault on three volunteer lifeguards which had taken place the previous weekend.
This was widely seen as the "tipping point" after years of intimidation, mostly directed at white female beach goers, with sentiments such as "I can't go to the beach, normally, and wear what I'd usually wear. Because when I do, I feel as though I'm getting targeted" being common. Muslims evidently took exception to bikinis and revealing swimwear, which led to verbal insults and physical assaults.
The disorders have been described as a race riot but that it is too simplistic. It was really a clash of cultures, and the result of a minority of religious zealots trying to impose its values on a secular society.
2008. Bernard Madoff is arrested and charged with securities fraud in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
2010. Two explosions occur in a busy shopping district of Stockholm, Sweden, killing one and injuring two others. Officials say the incident is being treated as a terrorist attack.
2011. Hundreds of army defectors battle Syrian government troops in the south of the country, in one of the largest confrontations since the uprising began. A general strike is observed in several regions of Syria.
Meanwhile, former leader of Panama Manuel Noriega is extradited home from France and the United States where he has been serving jail sentences for the past 22 years to serve more time for his role in the murder of political opponents.
Elsewhere, North Korea warns of "unexpected consequences" if South Korea lights a Christmas tree near their mutual border.
 

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Dec 12th : the two Ammonarias of Alexandria, virgin martyrs (c250): two young girls of the same name, Ammonaria, were among a band of women martyred in Alexandria under the Emperor Decius. Nothing is really known about them.

However, Gustave Flaubert, in his 'Temptation of St. Antony', imagined one of these girls as a childhood friend of Antony, who became a fanatically ascetic desert hermit tormented by demons offering lustful temptations – indeed, young Ammonaria was the last female in his home village to try to dissuade him from leaving for the ascetic life:

"When I left home, everyone found fault with me. My mother sank into a dying state; my sister, from a distance, made signs to me to come back; and the other one wept, Ammonaria, that child whom I used to meet every evening, beside the cistern, as she was leading away her cattle. She ran after me. The rings on her feet glittered in the dust, and her tunic, open at the hips, fluttered in the wind. The old ascetic who hurried me from the spot addressed her, as we fled, in loud and menacing tones. Then our two camels kept galloping continuously, till at length every familiar object had vanished from my sight."

While in the desert, he gets to hear that Christians were being persecuted in Alexandria, so he made his way to the city, hoping for martyrdom, but ...

" I found on my arrival that the persecution had ceased three days before. Just as I was returning, my path was blocked by a great crowd in front of the Temple of Serapis. I was told that the Governor was about to make one final example. In the centre of the portico, in the broad light of day, a naked woman was fastened to a pillar, while two soldiers were scourging her. At each stroke her entire frame writhed. Suddenly, she cast a wild look around, her trembling lips parted; and, above the heads of the multitude, her figure wrapped, as it were, in her flowing hair, methought I recognised Ammonaria. ... Yet this one was taller—and beautiful, exceedingly!
He draws his hand across his brow.
"No! no! I must not think upon it!"

What he has seen keeps haunting him in erotic dreams and visions:

"Come on, then, coward! Come on, then! Good! good! On the arms, on the back, on the breast, against the belly, everywhere! Hiss, thongs! bite me! tear me! I would like the drops of my blood to gush forth to the stars, to break my back, to strip my nerves bare! Pincers! wooden horses! molten lead! The martyrs bore more than that! Is that not so, Ammonaria?"
The shadows of the Devil's horns reappear.
"I might have been fastened to the pillar next to yours, face to face with you, under your very eyes, responding to your shrieks with my sighs, and our griefs would blend into one, and our souls would commingle."

"Where is Ammonaria now?
"Perhaps, in a hot bath she is drawing off her garments one by one, first her cloak, then her girdle, then her outer tunic, then her inner one, then the wrappings round her neck; and the vapour of cinnamon envelops her naked limbs. At last she sinks to sleep on the tepid floor. Her hair, falling around her hips, looks like a black fleece—and, almost suffocating in the overheated atmosphere, she draws breath, with her body bent forward and her breasts projecting. Hold! here is my flesh breaking into revolt. In the midst of anguish, I am tortured by voluptuousness. Two punishments at the same time—it is too much! I can no longer endure my own body!"

Not surprisingly, Flaubert's prose inspired several artists –

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December 12 has witnessed crashes, battles, and bombings. But the strangest event on this date involved a victory feast by Christian soldiers in which the enemy was the entree.

627. The Battle of Nineveh is fought. A Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius defeats Emperor Khosrau II's Persian forces, commanded by General Rhahzadh.
The Battle of Nineveh was the climactic battle of the last of the Roman-Persian Wars between the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Empire. The Byzantine victory broke the power of the Sassanid dynasty and briefly restored the empire to its ancient boundaries in the Middle East.
During a six-year campaign, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius had driven the Persians from Asia Minor back into their own territories, but the Persian emperor Khosrau II still refused to make peace. On December 12, 627, the main armies of Heraclius, in personal command, and Khosrau's army commanded by the general Rhahzadh, met at Nineveh. How many soldiers engaged in the battle is unknown, however, they are thought to be even.
The battle was closely contested, and was fought from dawn to dusk, but Heraclius' superior generalship won the day, and Rhahzadh was killed by Heraclius in the fighting. The Persian army was driven from the field and Persia lay open to the Byzantine army. The next year, Persia accepted Heraclius' peace terms.
884. Carloman, King of the West Franks, meets his death while hunting and is succeeded in the rule by his cousin, the Emperor Charles the Fat..

1098. The Massacre of Ma'arrat al-Numan takes place during the First Crusade. Crusaders breach the town's walls and massacre about 20,000 inhabitants, most of whom were eaten by the victors.
After the Crusaders, led by Raymond de Saint Gilles and Bohemond of Taranto, successfully besieged Antioch they found themselves with insufficient supplies of food. Their raids on the surrounding countryside during the winter months did not help the situation. By December 12, when they reached Ma'arra, many of them were suffering from starvation and malnutrition. They managed to breach the town's walls and massacred about 20,000 inhabitants, as they often did when they captured a town. However, this time, as they could not find enough food, they resorted to cannibalism.
One of the crusader commanders wrote to Pope Urban II: "A terrible famine racked the army in Ma'arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens."
Radulph of Caen, another chronicler, wrote: "In Ma'arra our troops boiled pagan adults alive in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled."
Those events had a strong impact on the local inhabitants of Middle East. The crusaders already had a reputation for cruelty and barbarism towards Muslims, Jews and even Orthodox Christians (the Crusades began shortly after the Great Schism of 1054). Crusaders are still referred as " cannibals" in many Middle Eastern languages and even centuries later their image as fanatical cannibals was alive in Arabic literature. Many authors suggest that the crusaders' behavior was not really born of their hunger but fanatical belief that the Muslims were even lower than the animals. Amin Maalouf in his book The Crusades through Arab Eyes points out the most crucial line for such belief among the Muslims: "Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!" by Albert of Aix.

1408. The Order of the Dragon a monarchical chivalric order is established by Sigismund of Luxembourg, then King of Hungary. Among the Order's first inductees was Vlad II, known as Vlad Dracul ("Vlad the Dragon"), who was was a voivode (prince) of Wallachia. He reigned from 1436 to 1442, and again from 1443 to 1447. He was the father of Mircea II, Vlad Călugărul, Vlad Ţepeş (also known as "Vlad the Impaler"), and Radu the Handsome. All four of Vlad II's sons would at one time rule Wallachia. Vlad Tepes would go on to become one of the most notorious rulers in history. (See mug shot.)
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Vlad III is remembered for spending much of his rule campaigning against the Ottoman Empire and its expansion and for the impaling of enemies. Even during his lifetime, Vlad III Țepeș became infamous as a tyrant taking sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing. The total number of his victims is estimated in the tens of thousands. Impalement was Vlad's preferred method of torture and execution. Several woodcuts from German pamphlets of the late 15th and early 16th centuries show Vlad feasting in a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brașov, while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims. It was reported that an invading Ottoman army turned back in fright when it encountered thousands of rotting corpses impaled on the banks of the Danube.
Vlad was deposed twice but they forgot the stake through the heart. After the sudden death of his brother Radu III the Fair in the year 1475, Vlad III declared his third reign in 26 November 1476. Vlad began preparations for the reconquest of Wallachia and in 1476, with Hungarian support. Vlad’s third reign had lasted little more than two months when he was assassinated. The exact date of his death is unknown, presumably the end of December 1476, but it is known that he was dead by 10 January 1477. The exact location of his death is also unknown, but it would have been somewhere along the road between Bucharest and Giurgiu. Vlad's head was taken to Constantinople as a trophy, and his body was buried unceremoniously by his rival, Basarab Laiota, possibly at Comana, a monastery founded by Vlad in 1461.
The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula was inspired by Vlad's patronymic Dracula, "son of the dragon."
1719. The Boston Gazette is published for the first time. The Boston Gazette was an early weekly newspaper printed in the British North American colonies. The paper was started as a rival to the Boston News-Letter, the first successful newspaper in the Colonies, which had begun its long run in 1704. In 1741 the Boston Gazette incorporated the New-England Weekly Journal and became the Boston-Gazette, or New-England Weekly Journal . Samuel Adams was a regular contributor in the 1760s and 70s.

1781. The Second Battle of Ushant is fought in the English Channel during the American Revolutionary War. A Royal Navy squadron, commanded by Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt in HMS Victory , defeats a French fleet.

1787. Pennsylvania becomes the second state to ratify the United States Constitution five days after Delaware became the first.
1806. Confederate General Stand Watie is born near Rome, Georgia. Watie, a Cherokee Indian, survived the tribe's Trail of Tears in the 1830s and became the only Native American to achieve the rank of general during the Civil War.
Even though the Cherokee suffered at the hands of Southerners, Watie and others always saw the federal government as the real culprit. When the South began to secede from the Union in 1860, Watie and others supported the new Confederacy. Watie was named colonel and raised a regiment of 300 mixed-blood Cherokee. Watie's first action came against Unionist Creek Indians near the Kansas border in 1861. At the Battle of Pea Ridge in 1862, Watie's regiment captured a Union battery in the midst of a Confederate defeat.

1862. During the American Civil War, the USS Cairo is sunk on the Yazoo River, becoming the first armored ship to be sunk by an electrically detonated mine.
1897. "The Katzenjammer Kids," the pioneering comic strip by Rudolph Dirks, debuts in the New York Journal.
1901. Guglielmo Marconi receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signal at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland, Canada.
1913. Two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Mona Lisa is recovered inside Italian waiter Vincenzo Peruggia's hotel room in Florence. Peruggia had previously worked at the Louvre and had participated in the heist with a group of accomplices dressed as Louvre janitors on the morning of August 21, 1911.
After the recovery of The Mona Lisa, Peruggia was convicted in Italy of the robbery and spent just 14 months in jail. The Mona Lisa was eventually returned to the Louvre, where it remains today, exhibited behind bulletproof glass. It is arguably the most famous painting in the world and is seen by millions of visitors every year.
1914. Wall Street is shaken by the largest one-day percentage drop in the history of Dow Jones Industrial Average, down 24.39%.
1917. In Nebraska, Father Edward J. Flanagan founds Boys Town as a farm village for wayward boys. The "City of Little Men" pioneered development of new juvenile care methods in 20th century America, emphasizing social preparation as a model for public boys' homes worldwide.
1917. More than 500 French soldiers are killed when their train derails in Modane, France. The troops were returning from fighting World War I in Italy. There was ample warning that the conditions were dangerous, but the French officers ignored the expert advice and insisted that the overcrowded train proceed as scheduled.
So many coach cars were attached to a single locomotive that the engineer in charge protested and refused to leave the station. The danger was not so much that the locomotive would not be able to pull the 19 cars, but that it wouldn't be able to stop the cars since there were no brakes on 16 of the coaches. A French officer, anxious to get the men home for the holidays, pulled out a gun and threatened the engineer until he agreed to begin the trip.
Unfortunately, the engineer's concerns were valid: As the train came out of the Mount Cern tunnel and approached the town of Modane in France, it had to descend a steep grade. The brakes could not hold the weight of the crowded coach cars and the train went out of control down the hill. Near the bottom, the train came to a wooden bridge and shot off the rails. The coach cars piled up; as they were made mostly of wood, many caught fire immediately. The death toll was estimated at between 500 and 800 men. The fire was so intense that it burned at least 400 of the bodies beyond recognition.

1925. The Majlis of Iran votes to crown Reza Khan as the new Shah of Persia. The Majlis ("assembly") was the legislative body of Iran.
1925. The first motel, the Motel Inn, opens in San Luis Obispo, California.
1935. The Lebensborn Project, a Nazi reproduction program, is founded by Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS. Lebensborn ("Wellspring of Life," in antiquated German) was a Nazi program that provided maternity homes and financial assistance to the wives of SS members and to unmarried mothers, and also ran orphanages and relocation programs for children.
Lebensborn expanded into several occupied European countries during the Second World War. In line with the racial and eugenic policies of Nazi Germany, the Lebensborn program was restricted to individuals who were deemed to be "biologically fit" and "racially pure" Aryans, and to SS members. In occupied countries, thousands of women facing social ostracism because they were in relationships with German soldiers and had become pregnant, had few alternatives other than applying for help with Lebensborn.

1937. Japanese aircraft shell and sink the U.S. gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River in China. Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. The Japanese claimed that they did not see the United States flags painted on the deck of the gunboat, apologized and paid an indemnity. Nevertheless, the attack and reports of the Nanjing Massacre caused U.S. opinion to turn sharply against the Japanese.

1939. During the Winter War, Finnish forces defeat the Soviet Union's Red Army troops in the Battle of Tolvajarvi in their first major victory of the conflict.
1939. HMS Duchess sinks after a collision with HMS Barham off the coast of Scotland with the loss of 124 men.

1941. During World War II, Great Britain declares war on Bulgaria. Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States. India declares war on Japan.
1941. The U.S. Navy takes control of the largest and most luxurious ocean liner on the seas at that time, France's Normandie, while it is docked at New York City. Shortly thereafter, the conversion for U.S. wartime use began. When France surrendered to the Germans in June 1940, and the puppet Vichy regime was installed, the Normandie was in dock at New York City. Immediately placed in "protective custody" by the Navy, it was clear that the U.S. government was not about to let a ship of such size and speed fall into the hands of the Germans, which it certainly would upon returning to France.
When the Navy did take control of the ship, shortly after Pearl Harbor, it began the conversion of the liner to a troop ship, renamed the USS Lafayette (after the French general who aided the American Colonies in their original quest for independence). The Lafayette never served its new purpose. On February 9, 1942, the ship caught fire and capsized. It was scrapped -- literally chopped up for scrap metal -- in 1946.
1942. A fire in a hostel in St. John's, Newfoundland kills 100 people.
 

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1946. A fire at a New York City ice plant spreads to a nearby tenement killing 37 people.

1948. The Batang Kali Massacre takes place during the Malayan Emergency as 14 members of the Scots Guards stationed in Malaysia allegedly massacre 24 unarmed civilians and set fire to the village.
1950. Paula Ackerman, the first woman appointed to perform rabbinical functions in the United States, leads the congregation in her first services.

1956. The Irish Republican Army's Border Campaign begins. The Border Campaign was a campaign of guerrilla warfare (codenamed Operation Harvest) carried out by the IRA against targets in Northern Ireland, with the aim of overthrowing that state and creating a United Ireland. The campaign was a failure and ended on February 26, 1962,
1958. Guinea joins the United Nations.
1963. Kenya gains its independence from the United Kingdom.
1965. Rookie running back Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scores six touchdowns during a single game against the San Francisco 49ers at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, tying the National Football League (NFL) record held by Ernie Nevers of the Chicago Cardinals (1929) and Dub Jones of the Cleveland Browns (1951) for most touchdowns in a single game.
1969. The offices of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (National Agrarian Bak) in Piazza Fontana, Milan, are bombed. The attack was carried out by neo-Fascist terrorists. In total, 16 people were killed and up to 90 were wounded. The aim of the attack was to make the public believe that the bombings were part of a communist insurgency, in order to "push the Italian state to proclaim the state of emergency," according to neo-Fascist terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra's confessions.
The group Ordine Nuovo (New Order) was behind the bombing. In July 1970 Ordine Nuovo bombed the Rome-Messina train, killing six and wounding 100. In May 1974 eight activists were killed in Brescia when an anti-fascist march was hand-grenaded by Ordine Nuovo.

1970. American actress Jennifer Connelly is born as Jennifer Lynn Connelly in upstate New York. Her first film role was as "young Deborah Gelly," a small part in Sergio Leone's 1984 gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America. The Academy Award-winning actress and former child model has been working in the film industry since she was a teenager and catapulted to fame on the basis of her appearances in films like Labyrinth and Career Opportunities. But she did not receive critical acclaim for her work until the 2000 drama Requiem for a Dream, and the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. (See photos.)
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1972. Two million people fill the streets of Azadi Square (Then Shahyad Square) in Tehran to protest against the Shah of Iran.

1977. American supermodel Bridget Hall is born in Springdale, Arkansas. At the age of 10, she was modeling in Dallas, Texas where she was living in the suburb of Farmers Branch, Texas.
Shortly after, she moved with her mother Donna Hall to New York City to pursue her modeling career. By the age of 18, she was listed in Forbes as one of the "best ten" moneymaking supermodels along with Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington. Hall is also looking for potential film roles. She has dated Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, and in the 90's was one of the top "Queens of the Catwalk." (See photos.)
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1979. A major earthquake and tsunami kill 259 people in Colombia.

1985. Arrow Air Flight 1285 crashes after takeoff in Gander, Newfoundland killing 256, including 248 members of the United States Army's 101st Airborne Division.

1988. The Clapham Junction rail crash in the UK kills 35 and injures hundreds after two collisions of three commuter trains. This is one of the worst train wrecks in British history.
1991. The Russian Federation gains independence from the USSR, the death knell of the Soviet Union. Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. Russia is also the eighth most populous nation with 143 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning nine time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms.
Following the Russian Revolution, Russia became the largest and leading constituent of the Soviet Union, the world's first constitutionally socialist state and a recognized superpower. The Russian Federation was founded following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but is recognized as the continuing legal personality of the Soviet state.

1996. Uday Hussein, eldest son of Saddam, is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. Uday was the kind of guy who knew how to make enemies. Although his status as Saddam Hussein's eldest son made him the prospective successor to his father, Uday fell out of favor with Saddam for his extravagance and recklessness. He was by all accounts a sadist and pervert par excellence.
In October 1988, at a party in honor of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Uday murdered his father's personal valet and food taster, Kemal Hana Gegeo. Before an assemblage of horrified guests, Uday -- intoxicated and in cold blood -- bludgeoned Gegeo with a cane, reputedly administering the coup de grâce with an electric carving knife. Gegeo had recently introduced Saddam to a beautiful younger woman, Samira Shahbandar, who later became Saddam's second wife. Uday considered his father's relationship with Shahbandar an insult to his own mother. He furthermore feared losing succession to Gegeo, whose loyalty and fidelity to Saddam Hussein were unquestioned. Mubarak later described Uday as a "psychopath."
Saddan sent Uday to prison for eight years. but it was a "private detention," and his sentence was later reduced to four years, with time off for perverted behavior.
A former member of the French foreign ministry claimed that Uday and his bodyguards broke into the hotel room of a French couple and forced them at gunpoint to perform sex acts while Uday videotaped them for later viewing. But the lad was no mere voyeur.
His fun-loving high jinks included kidnapping young Iraqi women from the streets in order to rape them. Uday was known to intrude on parties and otherwise "discover" women whom he would later rape. Time magazine published an article in 2003 detailing his sexual brutality, which included the use of acid. Uday allegedly murdered many of the women he had raped.
Uday beat an army officer unconscious when the man refused to allow Uday to dance with his wife; the man later died of his injuries. Uday also shot and killed an army officer who failed to salute him.
A former Uday body double look-alike, Latif Yahia, now living in the West, claimed that Uday was unable to perform sexually without causing pain and drawing blood from his sexual partners. Yahia said that Uday had raped numerous women, including a visiting Russian ballerina. Yahia has since released a book, co-authored with Karl Wendl, entitled I Was Saddam's Son.
Uday sustained permanent injuries during an assassination attempt possibly instigated by his younger brother Qusay inDecember 1996. Struck by eight bullets while driving his Porsche, Uday was initially believed to be paralyzed. Evacuated to Ibn Sina Hospital, he was treated by a Cuban medical team and eventually recovered his ability to walk, albeit with a limp. Despite repeated operations, however, a bullet remained lodged in his spine. In the wake of Uday's subsequent disabilities, Saddam gave Qusay increasing responsibility and authority, later designating him as his heir in 2000.
On July 22, 2003, the grim brothers went out with their guns blazing, shooting it out with American troops who raided their hideout in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. Uday popped out of hiding when he saw an American GI hot-wiring his Porsche. He and his brother were killed in the ensuing firefight.
1997. Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal is indicted as an adult on three counts of murder and five counts of attempted murder for the shooting of his classmates at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky. On December 1, Carneal pulled out a pistol and fired 11 shots into a group of students in the school's lobby. Although charged as an adult, Carneal's young age made him ineligible for the death penalty. He pleaded guilty but mentally ill, and he was sentenced to life in prison with a possibility of parole in 25 years.
1998. The House Judiciary Committee approves a fourth article of impeachment against President Bill Clinton and submits the case to the full House.
2000. The United States Supreme Court releases its decision in Bush v. Gore. which determines the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election.
In three separate opinions, a 7-2 majority of justices found that a ballot recount then being conducted in certain counties in the State of Florida was to be stopped due to the lack of a consistent standard. A 5-4 majority further declared in a per curiam opinion that there was insufficient time to establish standards for a new recount that would meet Florida's deadline for certifying electors.
The decision stopped the recount that was occurring in Florida and allowed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify George W. Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush a majority of the electoral college with 271 votes and enabled him to win the Presidency. Had the U.S. Constitution been followed, the contested election would have been settled by the House of Representatives but the outcome would still be the same since the House had a Republican majority.
2003. Keiko, the killer whale made famous by the Free Willy movies, dies in a Norwegian fjord.

2010. A heavy blizzard in the Midwestern U.S. states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan results in two deaths, road closures, flight cancellations and the inflatable roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapsing. Meanwhile, a large storm hits the Eastern Mediterranean region, resulting in deaths in several countries.
2011. A Chinese fishing boat captain allegedly stabs a Republic of Korea Coast Guard officer, killing him, after his boat is stopped for illegally fishing in South Korean waters.
United States President Barack Obama has asked Iran for the RQ-170 Sentinel that was captured near Kashmar on December 4. The Iranian government announced that the UAV was brought down by its Cyber warfare unit which commandeered the aircraft and safely landed it. The U.S. government claims that the drone malfunctioned and crashed, although the reported aircraft was later shown on Iranian TV with no apparent damage U.S. officials anonymously admitted that the drone was on a CIA spying mission over Iran when it was captured.
 
Dec 13th: Lucy of Syraceuse, virgin martyr (304). Her wealthy Roman father died when she was young, leaving her and her mother Eutychia without any protector. Her mother, Eutychia, had suffered four years with dysentery but Lucy had heard of St Agatha, and convinced her mother to pray with her at Agatha's tomb. They stayed up all night praying, until they fell asleep, exhausted. Agatha appeared in a vision to Lucy and said, "Soon you shall be the glory of Syracuse, as I am of Catania." At that instant Eutychia was cured.

Eutychia had arranged a marriage for Lucy with a pagan bridegroom, but Lucy urged that the dowry be given away to the poor, and that she should retain her virginity, telling her mother, "...whatever you give away at death you only give because you cannot take it with you. Give now to the true Savior, while you are healthy, whatever you intended to give away at your death." News that the family's wealth and jewels were being distributed as alms came to the ears of Lucy's fiance, who heard from a chattering nurse that Lucy had found "a nobler bridegroom."

The rejected pagan denounced Lucy as a Christian to the magistrate Paschasius, who ordered her to burn a sacrifice to the emperor's image. Lucy replied that she had given all that she had: "I offer to Him myself, let Him do with His offering as it pleases Him." Sentenced to be defiled in a brothel, Lucy asserted: "No one's body is polluted so as to endanger the soul if it has not pleased the mind. If you were to lift my hand to your idol and so make me offer against my will, I would still be guiltless in the sight of the true God, who judges according to the will and knows all things. If now, against my will, you cause me to be polluted, a double purity will be gloriously imputed to me. You cannot bend my will to your purpose; whatever you do to my body, that cannot happen to me."

The tradition states that when the guards came to take her away they found her so filled with the Holy Spirit that she was as stiff and heavy as a mountain; they could not move her even when they hitched her to a team of oxen. Even after she had a dagger through her throat, she prophesied against her persecutor.

Unfounded, and absent in the many narratives and traditions, at least until the 15th century, is the story of Lucia tortured by eye-gouging. In one version, her guards, angry that they cannot move her (physically or spiritually) gouge her eyes out with a fork. In another version, Lucy was admired by her unwanted suitor for her beautiful eyes. so she tore them out and gave them to him, saying, "Now let me live for God."The emblem of the eyes on the cup, or plate, must be linked simply to popular devotion to her as protector of sight, because of her name, Lucia (Latin lux, lucis "light") In paintings St. Lucy is frequently shown holding her eyes on a golden plate. Lucy was represented in Gothic art holding a dish with two eyes on it. The legend concludes with God giving Lucy even more beautiful eyes. She is consequently patron of the blind and those with eye troubles.

Her cult is recorded from as early as the 5th century, but her legend only developed in the later middle ages, when she became one of the most widely-venerated virgin martyrs. Her relics have had a tortuous history, her most important shrine being in Venice. they were transferred to the church of San Geremia when the church of Santa Lucia was demolished in the 19th century to make way for the new railway terminus. A century later, on 7 November 1981, thieves stole all her bones, except her head. Police recovered them five weeks later, on her feast day. Other reputed parts of the corpse have found their way to Rome, Naples, Verona, Lisbon, Milan, as well as Germany and France.

The feast is an ancient holiday in many Catholic countries, with traditions that can be traced back to Sicily. On 13th of every December it is celebrated there with feasts of home made pasta and various other dishes, with a special dessert of wheat in hot chocolate milk. The large grains of soft wheat are representative of her eyes and are a treat only to be indulged in once a year. Special devotion to St. Lucy is also present in northern Italy, and in the Dalmatian region of Croatia.

By the Reformation, Dec 13th was the shortest day of the year in the Julian calendar, and celebrations reflect this, especially in Scandinavia, where it is one of very few saints' days celebrated by the Lutheran Church, and young girls dress as the saint in honor of the feast and to bring light and blessings to their families that will last through the darkness of winter.

Dante regarded Lucia with great reverence, "of all cruelty the foe". In the Inferno Canto II she instructs Virgil to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory, and he places her opposite Adam within the Mystic Rose in Canto XXXII of the Paradiso .

John Donne's poem, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie's Day, being the shortest day" (1627) begins: "'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's," and expresses, in a mourning tone, the withdrawal of the world into sterility and darkness, where "The world's whole sap is sunk."

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December 13 has been a lucky day for rebel armies but a bad day for convicted wife-killers whose girl friends have book deals.
558. King Chlothar I reunites the Frankish Kingdom after his brother Childebert I dies. He becomes sole ruler of the Franks. On the death of his father in 511, he received, as his share of the kingdom, the town of Soissons, which he made his capital; the cities of Laon, Noyon, Cambrai, and Maastricht; and the lower course of the Meuse River. But he was very ambitious, and sought to extend his domain. He was the chief instigator of the murder of his brother Chlodomer's children in 524, and his share of the spoils consisted of the cities of Tours and Poitiers. In 531, he marched against the Thuringii with his nephew Theudebert I and in 542, with his brother Childebert I against the Visigoths of Spain. On the death of his great-nephew Theodebald in 555, Chlothar annexed his territories. On Childebert's death in 558 he became sole king of the Franks
He also ruled over the greater part of Germany, made expeditions into Saxony, and for some time exacted from the Saxons an annual tribute of 500 cows. The end of his reign was troubled by internal dissensions, his son Chram rising against him on several occasions. Following Chram into Brittany, where the rebel had taken refuge, Chlothar shut him up with his wife and children in a cottage, which he set on fire. Overwhelmed with remorse, he went to Tours to implore forgiveness at the tomb of St Martin, and died shortly afterwards at the royal palace at Compiègne.

1294. Saint Celestine V abdicates the papacy after only five months; Celestine hoped to return to his previous life as an ascetic hermit.
In the formal instrument of his renunciation he recites as the causes moving him to step down -- the desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquillity of his former life." After divesting himself of the trappings of power, he retired to his previous solitude.
Celestine V was not allowed to remain there, however. His successor, Pope Boniface VIII, sent for him, and finally, despite desperate attempts of the former Pope to escape, imprisoned him in the castle of Fumone near Ferentino in Campagna, where, after languishing for ten months, he died on May 19, 1296. Some historians believe he might have been murdered by Boniface VIII, and indeed his skull has a suspicious hole.

1577. Sir Francis Drake sets out from Plymouth, England, on his round-the-world voyage.
1621. Under the care of Robert Cushman, the first American furs to be exported from the continent leave for England aboard the Fortune. One month before, Cushman and the Fortune had arrived at Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts with 35 settlers, the first new colonists since the settlement was founded in 1620. During Cushman's return to England, the Fortune was captured by the French, and its valuable cargo of furs was taken.
Within a few years of their first fur export, the Plymouth colonists, unable to make their living through cod fishing as they had originally planned, began concentrating almost entirely on the fur trade. The colonists developed an economic system in which their chief crop, Indian corn, was traded with Native Americans to the north for highly valued beaver skins, which were in turn profitably sold in England to pay the Plymouth Colony's debts and buy necessary supplies.

1636. The Massachusetts Bay Colony organizes three militia regiments to defend the colony against the Pequot Indians. This organization is recognized today as the founding of the United States National Guard.
In the 1630s, the Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil. The Pequot aggressively worked to extend their area of control in all directions, at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, the Narragansett to the east, the Connecticut River Valley Algonquians and Mohegan to the west, and the Algonquian peoples of present-day Long Island to the south -- who in turn, contended with one another for dominance and control of the European trade. The Dutch and the English were also striving to extend the reach of their trade into the interior in order to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region.
The Pequot War was an armed conflict in 1637 between an alliance of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, with American Indian allies (the Narragansett, and Mohegan Indians), against the Pequots. This war saw the elimination of the Pequot as a viable polity in what is present-day southern New England.
Hundreds were killed; hundreds more were captured and sold into slavery to the West Indies. Those who managed to evade death or capture and enslavement dispersed. It would take the Pequot more than three and a half centuries to regain their former political and economic power in their traditional homeland region along the Pequot (present-day Thames) and Mystic Rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut. They have accomplished that with their Foxwoods Casino resort, a multi-million dollar operation that has made them a power to be reckoned with. Nowadays, the English (and everyone else) are welcomed with open arms and encouraged to leave their money at the gaming tables.
1642. Dutch navigator Abel Tasman becomes the first European explorer to sight the South Pacific island group now known as New Zealand.

1643. During the English Civil War, the Battle of Alton takes place in Hampshire. It is a decisive victory for the Parliamentary army and over 700 Royalist soldiers are captured.
1769. Dartmouth College is founded in New Hampshire by the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, with a Royal Charter from King George III, on land donated by Royal Governor John Wentworth.
1776. During the Revolutionary War, American General Charles Lee leaves his army, riding in search of female sociability at Widow White's Tavern in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
General George Washington had repeatedly urged General Lee to expedite his movements across New Jersey in order to reinforce Washington's position on the Delaware River. Lee, who took a commission in the British army upon finishing military school at age 12 and served in North America during the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War in the colonies), felt slighted that the less experienced Washington had been given command of the Continental Army and showed no inclination to rush.
Famed for his temper and intemperance, the Mohawk had dubbed Lee "Boiling Water." Lee was an adopted tribesman through his marriage to a Mohawk woman, but his union apparently failed to quell his interest in prostitutes. Lee rode to Widow White's tavern with a minimal guard and it was there that Banastre Tarleton and the 16th Queen's Light Dragoons captured him on the morning of December 14. The British rejoiced at the capture of the Patriots' best-trained commander, while Washington fruitlessly negotiated for his release. Meanwhile, Lee enjoyed his captivity, even drafting a battle plan for his captors from plush accommodations in which his personal servant maintained his three rooms and no doubt served his food and wine in a most civilized fashion. The British did not act upon his plan, and Lee reported to Valley Forge upon his release in May 1778. After a series of arguments with Washington, Lee was suspended from the army in December 1778 and dismissed in 1780.
1809. Dr. Ephraim McDowell performs the first ovariotomy, removing a 22 pound tumor.
1862. Rebels are racking up victories once again on this date. This time it is the American Civil War, and the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia. (See picture)
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Confederate General Robert E. Lee defeats the Union Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, who launches an ill-advised frontal assault on the heavily fortified city.
1867. A Fenian bomb explodes in Clerkenwell, London, killing six people. Fenian was an umbrella term for the Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), fraternal organisations dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic in the 19th and early 20th century. The name "Fenians" was first applied by John O'Mahony to the members of the Irish republican group which he founded in the United States in 1831.
1916. A powerful avalanche kills hundreds of Austrian soldiers in a barracks near Italy's Mount Marmolada in World War I. Over a period of several days, avalanches in the Italian Alps killed an estimated 10,000 Austrian and Italian soldiers in mid-December. The avalanches occurred as the Austrians and Italians were fighting World War I and some witnesses claim that the avalanches were purposefully caused to use as a weapon.
1918. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson arrives in France to take part in World War I peace negotiations and to promote his plan for a League of Nations, an international organization for resolving conflicts between nations.

1937. The Chinese capital of Nanjing (Nanking) falls to the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese defeat is followed by a massacre that is known as the Rape of Nanking. The atrocities were so horrendous that even a Nazi official on the scene attempted to put a stop to it, venturing out in his Swastika armband to appeal to Japanese officers. He was treated with respect but his entreaties were ignored. The official even appealed directly to Adolf Hitler to intercede but was ignored once again.
1941. Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States in World War II.
1942. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels records in his journal his contempt for the Italians' treatment of Jews in Italian-occupied territories. "The Italians are extremely lax in their treatment of Jews. They protect Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and won't permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David." His vituperative anti-Semitism, which included blaming the war itself on the Jews in a screed published in the German magazine Das Reich, could not be contained within the boundaries of Germany. He expected the same of his allies. But, truth be told, in the earliest days of fascism, Mussolini had denied any truth to the idea of a "pure" race and had counted Jews among his close colleagues-and was even a Zionist!
But with Italy's failing fortunes militarily, Mussolini needed to stress the Italians' "superiority" in some sense, and so began to mimic many of the racial and anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazis. Nevertheless, Mussolini never had the stomach -- or the conviction -- for the extremes of Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler. And certainly the majority of the Italian people never subscribed to the growing anti-Semitic rhetoric of the regime. In fact, the Italians refused to deport Jews from Italy-or from Italian-occupied Croatia or France-to Auschwitz.

1944. During World War II, the U.S. cruiser Nashville is badly damaged in a Japanese kamikaze suicide attack that claims 138 lives.
1951. Foreign Service Officer John S. Service is dismissed from the Department of State following a determination by the Civil Service Commission's Loyalty Board that there was "reasonable doubt" concerning his loyalty to the United States. Service fought the dismissal, and was eventually reinstated in 1957, but his career never recovered from the damage.

1959. Archbishop Makarios becomes the first President of Cyprus.
1960. While Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia visits Brazil, his Imperial Bodyguard seizes the capital and proclaim him deposed and his son, Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, Emperor.
1967. Constantine II of Greece attempts an unsuccessful counter-coup against the Regime of the Colonels.
1968. Brazilian president Artur da Costa e Silva decrees the AI-5 (or the fifth Institutional Act), which lasts until 1978 and marks the beginning of the hard times of Brazilian military dictatorship.
1972. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt begin the third and final Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) or "Moonwalk" of Apollo 17. To date they are the last humans to set foot on the Moon.
1977. A DC-3 aircraft chartered from the Indianapolis-based National Jet crashes near Evansville Regional Airport, killing 29, including the University of Evansville basketball team, support staff and boosters of the team.

1978. The first Susan B. Anthony dollar is put in circulation. Like the Ford Edsel, it was an idea whose time had not come. People disliked the dollar coin because it was easily mistaken for the U.S. quarter. It quickly earned the sobriquet of the "Carter Quarter" (a reference to then President Jimmy Carter) and it is no longer minted by the U.S. Treasury.

1981. General Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law in Poland to prevent dismantling of the communist system by Solidarity.
1988. Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat gives a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in the Swiss city of Geneva after the United States authorities refused to give him a visa to enter New York.

1996. Kofi Annan is elected as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

2000. 36 days following Election Day in America, Republican George W. Bush claims the presidency after Vice President Al Gore delivers his concession speech, ending his hopes of becoming the 43rd President of the United States.
2003. Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is captured near his home town of Tikrit.

2004. A jury in Redwood City, California, recommends the death penalty for Scott Peterson for the murders of his wife and unborn child.
On November 12, the jury convicted Peterson of first-degree murder with special circumstances for killing Laci and second-degree murder for killing his unborn son. The penalty phase of the trial began on November 30 and concluded December 13, when at 1:50 PM PST, the twelve-person jury recommended a death sentence for Peterson.
In later press appearances, members of the jury stated that they felt that Peterson's demeanor -- specifically, his lack of emotion, and the phone calls to his paramour Amber Frey in the days after Laci's disappearance -- indicated that he was guilty. They based their verdict on "hundreds of small puzzle pieces" of circumstantial evidence that came out during the trial, from the location of Laci Peterson's body to the myriad of lies her husband told after her disappearance.
Peterson's affair with Amber Frey was never presented to the jury as a probable motive for the crime. However, the prosecution did present the affair as an indication of Peterson's character. Prosecutors surmised that Peterson killed his wife and unborn child due to increasing debt, and a desire for freedom -- a desire to return to the "bachelor" lifestyle, where he would be free from the obligations of his impending family life.
In January 2005, weeks after the initial guilty verdict was handed down, Amber Frey released a book about her experiences with Scott Peterson. She was criticized for using her involvement in the case for her own personal gain. The fact that the book was published so soon after the trial ended fueled speculation that Frey was working on the book during the trial -- which would have violated the gag order placed on all witnesses in this trial by the judge. Her publisher allegedly told Frey that a "not guilty" verdict would result in no book deal for her. Laci's family also criticized her for placing her photograph between Scott's and Laci's on the cover of her book (See pictures -- they are not the ones that appear in the book.)
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2010. A Liberian owned cargo vessel with 24 Filipino crew is seized by Somali pirates 550 nautical miles from the coast of India.
2011. Pakistan police rescue 50 boys from a dungeon in Karachi, Pakistan. Police reports say that the dungeon was equipped with shackles and hooks. The prisoners say they were beaten and threatened and that, if they had tried to escape, they would have been forced to join Jihad militants.

At least 5,000 people are now estimated to have been killed in Syria's uprising, amid continuing violence.

Meanwhile, a gunman opens fire and throws explosives into a crowd in an attack in the Belgian city of Liège.
some nice girls with a nice Ariel
 

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