Christmas Eve
1166: Birthdays: English King John I.
1737: Birthdays: American diplomat Silas Deane.
1745: Birthdays: Physician and chemist Benjamin Rush.
1809: Birthdays: Frontiersman Christopher Kit Carson.
1814: The Treaty of Ghent was signed by representatives of the United States and Britain, ending the War of 1812.
1818: Birthdays: English physicist and inventor James Prescott Joule.
1851: The Library of Congress and part of the Capitol building in Washington were destroyed by fire.
1865: A group of Confederate veterans met in Pulaski, Tenn., to form a secret society they called the Ku Klux Klan.
1871: Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida premiered in Cairo. It had been commissioned to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal.
1880: Birthdays: Raggedy Ann creator Johnny Gruelle.
1886: Birthdays: Film director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca).
1893: Birthdays: Composer Harry Warren (Lullaby of Broadway, Chattanooga Choo Choo).
1905: Birthdays: Industrialist, moviemaker and aviator Howard Hughes.
1906: Reginald A. Fessenden, a Canadian-born radio inventor, broadcast the first musical program, accompanying on violin a female singer’s O Holy Night, from Brant Rock, Mass. He discovered the superheterodyne principle, the basis for modern radio receivers.
1907: Birthdays: Investigative journalist I.F. Stone.
1914: The World War I “Christmas truce” began.
1922: Birthdays: Actor Ava Gardner.
1923: Birthdays: U.S. Army Gen. George Patton IV.
1942: German rocket engineers launched the first surface-to-surface guided missile. Adm. Jean Louis Darlan, the French administrator of North Africa, was assassinated as a sympathizer of the French Vichy regime.
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1945: Birthdays: Author/director Nicholas Meyer.
1952: Birthdays: Writer Christopher Buckley.
1966: Birthdays: Actor Diedrich Bader.
1971: Birthdays: Pop singer Ricky Martin.
1973: Birthdays: Twilight series author Stephenie Meyer.
1974: Birthdays: Television and radio personality Ryan Seacrest.
1983: One of the United States’ severest early season cold waves in history claimed nearly 300 lives.
1989: Manuel Noriega, the object of U.S. invasion forces, took refuge at the Vatican Embassy in Panama City and asked for political asylum.
1990: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein threatened to attack Tel Aviv, Israel, if the allies tried to retake Kuwait. The bells of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow rang to celebrate Christmas for the first time since the death of Lenin.
1992: U.S. President George H.W. Bush issued pardons to former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and five others involved in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal.
1994: Islamic militants hijacked an Air France Airbus. The hijacking ended two days later when the plane was stormed by French paramilitary commandos in Marseille, who killed the four militants.
1997: A French court convicted the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal of the 1975 killings of three men in Paris and sentenced him to life in prison.
2004: Gunmen opened fire on a bus in northern Honduras, killing at least 23 and wounding 16. Authorities suspected a Central American youth gang. A Chinese freighter wrecked in the Aleutian Islands broke apart, spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the Bering Sea.
2005: Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist whose research on stem cells and cloning won him international acclaim, resigned after admitting he fabricated his groundbreaking paper in which he claimed to have created stem cell colonies from 11 patients.
2007: The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission accused the CIA of interfering with the panel’s work by failing to turn over tapes of agents interrogating suspected terrorists with enhanced techniques, including waterboarding.
2008: In his Christmas Eve midnight mass at the Vatican in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI called for an end to exploitation of children who he said are being made instruments of violence, instead of messengers of reconciliation and peace.
2009: The U.S. Senate passed a landmark $871 billion national healthcare reform bill after months of proposals, debate and revisions, guaranteeing access to health insurance for about 31 million Americans. Differences in the Senate and House bills had to be resolved before a plan went to the president. An apparently mentally ill woman knocked Pope Benedict XVI off his feet as the Christmas Eve mass began at the Vatican. The pope wasn’t hurt but a nearby cardinal suffered a broken leg. Officials said the woman had attempted a similar attack during the 2008 function.
2010: With the peaking holiday travel rush and potential terrorists in mind, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration on Christmas Eve added insulated thermos jugs and coffee mugs to the list of items for special airport screening. The number of assassinations of alleged American spies in Pakistan – reportedly as many as seven killings in a week — appeared to be linked to the increasing number of U.S.-fired drone missiles in the country, observers said in a published report.
2011: U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law a $915 billion measure to fund federal operations through the 2012 fiscal year and avert a governmental shutdown. The ensuing year-end flurry also saw extensions of the payroll tax break and long-term jobless benefits.