This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1812 The French invasion of Russia, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, officially ends with the French having lost as many as 530,000 people.

1911 Norwegian Roald Amundsen's Antarctic expedition is the 1st to reach the South Pole.

1918 Sinn Féin candidates win 73 of 105 Irish seats in UK general election, though all will refuse to take seats in Westminster, instead meeting at a Dail Eireann in Dublin.

1941 Premier Winston Churchill travels to US on board HMS Duke of York.

1941 U-557 torpedoes British cruiser Galatea.

1952 UN Troops kill 82 North Korean POWs during a prison camp riot in Pongam-do, South Korea.

1967 DNA created in a test tube.

1977 Dutch war criminal Pieter Menten sentenced in Amsterdam to 15 years.

[Jimbuna]

1840 Napoleon Bonaparte receives a French state funeral in Paris 19 years after his death.

1941 German submarine U-127 sinks.

1941 USS Swordfish becomes 1st US sub to sink a Japanese ship.

1944 American bandleader Major Glenn Miller, lost over the English Channel.

1944 Hizbu'allah (Arm forces for Allah) forms.

1944 US Congress gives General Eisenhower his 5th star.

1961 Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death for war crimes in Israel.

1973 American Psychiatric Association declares homosexuality is not a mental illness.

[Jimbuna]

1773 Boston Tea Party incident - Sons of Liberty protesters throw tea shipments into Boston harbor in protest against British imposed Tea Act.

1907 As a gesture of the US's new presence as a world power, President Theodore Roosevelt sends the 'Great White Fleet' on a round-the-world cruise, visiting ports internationally.

1914 German warships fire more than 500 shells on northern English towns of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool - 1st time English civilians targeted during the war - kill 137 people.

1944 Nazi Germany launches a counteroffensive against the Allies in the Ardennes region of Belgium, beginning the 'Battle of the Bulge'

[bweiss]

1864 - Union troops devastate Confederate forces at Nashville, Tennessee.

1914 Imperial German Navy raids British ports of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby.

1942 The Soviet 3rd Guards Army, reinforced by the 17th and 25th Tank Corps, commence the Tatsinskaya Raid to threaten relief efforts for the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad.

1968 The American-British musical-fantasy film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", opens at the Odeon Leicester Square theater, London.

1994 Davy Jones, former lead singer of, "The Monkees", charged with DWI after being stopped on a central Pennsylvania road.

[Jimbuna]

1900 First prize of 100,000 francs offered for communications with extraterrestrials. Martians excluded-considered too easy.

1903 The Wright brothers make the first sustained motorized aircraft flight at 10:35 AM, piloted by Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

1914 Jews are expelled from Tel Aviv by Turkish authorities.

1918 A conference of workers' and soldiers' councils take control of German government in Berlin, until elections in January selects new national assembly.

1969 USAF closes Project Blue Book, concluding no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings.

1986 Davina Thompson makes medical history by having the 1st heart, lung and liver transplant at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England.

[Jimbuna]

1916 Battle of Verdun, longest of World War I, officially ends in German defeat after nine months of fighting and almost 1 million total casualties.

1941 44 surviving crewmen of German U-434 surrender to the HMS Blankney after scuttling their wounded submarine. Two are lost.

1944 US Destroyers Hull, Spence & Monaghan sink in typhoon (Philippines)

1971 Three members of the Irish Republican Army die when the bomb they were transporting explodes prematurely in King Street, Magherafelt, County Derry.

2019 US House of Representatives votes to impeach President Donald Trump for abuse of power (230-197) and obstruction of Congress (229-198)

[Jimbuna]

1783 William Pitt the Younger becomes the youngest ever British Prime Minister at age 24

1932 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) begins transmitting overseas.

1941 Adolf Hitler takes complete command of German Army.

1941 German submarine U-574 sinks.

1949 Luxury passenger ship Aquitania demolished in Gareloch, Scotland.

1950 General Eisenhower named NATO commander.

1958 First radio broadcast from space, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends a Christmas message "to all mankind, America's wish for peace on Earth and goodwill to men everywhere"

1960 Fire aboard USS Constellation, under construction at Brooklyn (50 die)

1975 The Red Hand Commandos, a very secretive Ulster loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, explode a no-warning car bomb in Dundalk, killing 2 civilians and wounding 20

1984 Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sign the Sino-British Joint Declaration to transfer Hong Kong back to China in 1997

[Jimbuna]

1917 Soviet state security force and forerunner to the KGB, the Cheka forms, under Felix Dzerzhinsky after decree by Vladimir Lenin.

1924 Adolf Hitler freed from jail early, having served only nine months of five-year sentence for "Beer Hall Putsch"

1944 Battle of Bastogne: Nazis surround 101st Airborne (NUTS!)

1957 Elvis Presley receives his draft notice to join the US Army for national service.

1960 Auschwitz commandant Richard Bar arrested in German FR

1963 Berlin Wall opens for first time to West Berliners.

[Jimbuna]

1872 Phileas Fogg completes his round the world trip in 80 days, in Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days"

1925 "Battleship Potemkin", Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, starring Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy and Grigori Aleksandrov, premieres in Moscow.

1939 Adolf Hitler names Adolf Eichmann leader of "Referat IV B", responsible for evictions and Jewish immigration.

1941 German submarine U-567 sinks.

1971 A publican is killed as he tried to remove a bomb from his pub, Northern Ireland.

1988 Lockerbie disaster: A terrorist bomb destroys Pan Am Flight 103 mid-air, over Scotland; killing all 259 passengers and crew on board, and 11 people on the ground.

1991 Soviet Union formally dissolves as 11 of 12 republics sign treaty forming the Commonwealth of Independent States.

[Aktungbby]

1913: the first newspaper crossword puzzle, billed as "Word Cross Puzzle" is published in the New York World.

[Jimbuna]

1894 French officer Alfred Dreyfus court-martialed for treason, triggers worldwide charges of anti-Semitism (Dreyfus later vindicated)

1942 World War II: Adolf Hitler signs the order to develop the V-2 rocket as a weapon.

1944 Germans demand surrender of American troops at Bastogne, Belgium.

1944 Sub Swordfish departs Pearl Harbor for Japan.

1963 Official 30-day mourning period for President John F. Kennedy ends.

1964 First flight of the US aircraft Lockheed SR-71, reaches 3,530 kph (record for a jet)

1970 Treblinka SS commander Franz Stangl sentenced to life imprisonment.

1974 Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb home of former UK Prime Minister, Edward Heath, just before announcing Christmas ceasefire (no-one injured)

1989 After 23 years of dictatorial rule, Romania ousts Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

2010 Repeal of the "Don't Ask Don't Tell policy", a 17-year-old policy banning homosexuals serving openly in the US military, signed into law by President Barack Obama.

[Jimbuna]

1888 Vincent van Gogh cuts off his left ear with a razor, after argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, and sends to a female courtesan for safe keeping.

1920 Government of Ireland Act / Home Rule Act passed partitioning Ireland.

1933 Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe sentenced to death for setting the German Reichstag on fire.

1941 American forces on Wake Island surrender to Japanese.

1943 General Bernard Montgomery told he is appointed commandant for D-day.

1962 Cuba starts returning US prisoners from Bay of Pigs invasion.

1968 82 members of US intelligence ship Pueblo released by North Korea.

[Jimbuna]

1814 Treaty of Ghent signed, ending the War of 1812 between the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies.

1939 World War II: Pope Pius XII makes a Christmas Eve appeal for peace.

1941 First ships of admiral Nagumo's Pearl Harbor fleet return to Japan.

1942 First powered flight of V-1 'buzz bomb', Peenemunde, Germany.

1943 US President FDR appoints General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of the Allied forces.

1946 US General MacNarney gives 800,000 "minor Nazis" amnesty.

[Jimbuna]

1932 Emperor Hirohito of Japan narrowly evades an assassination attempt by a Korean independence activist, Lee Bong-chang.

1943 German warship "Scharnhorst" sinks in Barents Sea.

1943 Montgomery discusses Operation Overlord (D-day landings) with Eisenhower & Bedell Smith.

1996 Taliban forces retake the strategic Bagram air base which solidifies their buffer zone around Kabul.

2001 The People's Republic of China is granted permanent normal trade relations with the United States.

[Aktungbby]

2012: Russias premier, Vladimir Putin, signed a law banning Americans from adopting Russian children. ... considering his kidnapping/removal of Ukrainian children during the present hostilities, methinks a 'double standard" is in effect?