December 9 is the 343rd day of the year (344th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 22 days remaining until the end of the year.
Holidays
- Anna’s Day, marks the day to start the preparation process of the lutefisk to be consumed on Christmas Eve, as well as a Swedish name day, celebrating all people named Anna. (Sweden and Finland)
- Christian Feast Day:
- Independence Day, celebrate the independence of Tanganyika from Britain in 1961. (Tanzania)
- International Anti-Corruption Day (International)
- National Heroes Day, formerly V.C. Bird Day. (Antigua and Barbuda)
- Yuri’s Day in the Autumn (Russian Orthodox Church)
History
In 480, Odoacer, first King of Italy, occupies Dalmatia. He later establishes his political power with the co-operation of the Roman Senate.
In 536, Gothic War: The Byzantine general Belisarius enters Rome unopposed; the Gothic garrison flee the capital.
In 730, Battle of Marj Ardabil: The Khazars annihilate an Umayyad army and kill its commander, al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah al-Hakami.
In 1425, The Catholic University of Leuven is founded.
In 1531, The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico City.
In 1775, American Revolutionary War: British troops lose the Battle of Great Bridge, and leave Virginia soon afterward.
In 1793, New York City‘s first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, is established by Noah Webster.
In 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.
In 1835, Texas Revolution: The Texian Army captures San Antonio, Texas.
In 1851, The first YMCA in North America is established in Montreal, Quebec.
In 1856, The Iranian city of Bushehr surrenders to occupying British forces.
In 1861, American Civil War: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War is established by the U.S. Congress.
In 1872, In Louisiana, P. B. S. Pinchback becomes the first serving African-American governor of a U.S. state.
In 1875, The Massachusetts Rifle Association, “America’s Oldest Active Gun Club”, is founded.
In 1888, Statistician Herman Hollerith installs his computing device at the United States War Department.
In 1897, Activist Marguerite Durand founds the feminist daily newspaper, La Fronde, in Paris.
In 1905, In France, the law separating church and state is passed.
In 1911, A mine explosion near Briceville, Tennessee, kills 84 miners despite rescue efforts led by the United States Bureau of Mines.
In 1916, KIRK DOUGLAS was born. He is TV and movie actor who was onscreen with his real family in the series, It Runs in the Family, and also starred in The Odyssey, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
In 1917, World War I: In Palestine, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby captures Jerusalem.
In 1922, Gabriel Narutowicz is elected the first president of Poland.
In 1930, Rube Foster, American baseball player and manager (b. 1879) dies. He was an American baseball player, manager, and pioneer executive in the Negro leagues. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981. Foster, considered by historians to have been perhaps the best African-American pitcher of the first decade of the 1900s, also founded and managed the Chicago American Giants, one of the most successful black baseball teams of the pre-integration era. Most notably, he organized the Negro National League, the first long-lasting professional league for African-American ballplayers, which operated from 1920 to 1931. He is known as the “father of Black Baseball.” Foster adopted his longtime nickname, “Rube”, as his official middle name later in life.
In 1931, The Constituent Cortes approves a constitution which establishes the Second Spanish Republic.
In 1935, Walter Liggett, American newspaper editor and muckraker, is killed in a gangland murder.
In 1937, Second Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Nanking – Japanese troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Asaka Yasuhiko launch an assault on the Chinese city of Nanjing (Nanking).
In 1940, World War II: Operation Compass – British and Indian troops under the command of Major-General Richard O’Connor attack Italian forces near Sidi Barrani in Egypt.
In 1941, World War II: The Republic of China, Cuba, Guatemala, and the Philippine Commonwealth, declare war on Germany and Japan.
In 1941, World War II: The American 19th Bombardment Group attacks Japanese ships off the coast of Vigan, Luzon.
In 1946, The “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” begin with the “Doctors’ Trial“, prosecuting physicians and officers alleged to be involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia.
In 1946, The Constituent Assembly of India meets for the first time to write the Constitution of India.
In 1950, Cold War: Harry Gold is sentenced to 30 years in jail 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.
In 1953, Red Scare: General Electric announces that all communist employees will be discharged from the company.
In 1956, Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 810, a Canadair North Star, crashes near Hope, British Columbia, Canada, killing all 62 people on board.
In 1958, The John Birch Society is founded in the United States.
In 1960, The first episode of Coronation Street, the world’s longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the United Kingdom.
In 1961, Tanganyika becomes independent from Britain.
In 1962, The Petrified Forest National Park is established in Arizona.
In 1965, Kecksburg UFO incident: A fireball is seen from Michigan to Pennsylvania; witnesses report something crashing in the woods near Pittsburgh. In 2005 NASA admits that it examined the object.
In 1966, Barbados joins the United Nations.
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as “The Mother of All Demos“, publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS).
In 1969, U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers proposes his plan for a ceasefire in the War of Attrition; Egypt and Jordan accept it over the objections of the PLO, which leads to civil war in Jordan in September 1970.
In 1971, The United Arab Emirates join the United Nations.
In 1971, Indo-Pakistani War: The Indian Air Force executes an airdrop of Indian Army units, bypassing Pakistani defences.
In 1973, British and Irish authorities sign the Sunningdale Agreement in an attempt to establish a power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive and a cross-border Council of Ireland.
In 1975, William A. Wellman, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1896) dies. He was an American film director and actor. Although Wellman began his film career as an actor, he worked on over 80 films, as director, producer and consultant, but most often as a director, notable for his work in crime, adventure and action genre films, often focusing on aviation themes, a particular passion. He also directed several well-regarded satirical comedies.
Wellman directed the 1927 film Wings, which became the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture at the 1st Academy Awards ceremony.
In his career, Wellman won a single Academy Award, for the story of A Star Is Born. He was nominated as best director three times, for A Star Is Born, Battleground and The High and Mighty, for which he was also nominated by the Directors Guild of America as best director. In 1973, the DGA honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Wellman also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6125 Hollywood Blvd.
In 1979, The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first and to date only human disease driven to extinction.
In 1987, Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The First Intifada begins in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
In 1988, The Michael Hughes Bridge in Sligo, Ireland, is officially opened.
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In 1995, Douglas Corrigan, American pilot (b. 1907) dies. He was an American aviator born in Galveston, Texas. He was nicknamed “Wrong Way” in 1938. After a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, California, to New York, he flew from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, to Ireland, though his flight plan was filed to return to Long Beach. He claimed his unauthorized flight was due to a navigational error, caused by heavy cloud cover that obscured landmarks and low-light conditions, causing him to misread his compass. However, he was a skilled aircraft mechanic (he was one of the builders of Charles Lindbergh‘s Spirit of St. Louis) and had made several modifications to his own plane, preparing it for his transatlantic flight. He had been denied permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland, and his “navigational error” was seen as deliberate. Nevertheless, he never publicly admitted to having flown to Ireland intentionally.
In 2003, A blast in the center of Moscow kills six people and wounds several more.
In 2006, Residents of a house in Memphis, Tenn., were awakened by a home-invasion robbery. Two men burst in and started shooting. During the robbery one of the victims grabbed a sword and swung it at one robber’s gun just as he was about to fire. The blow severed the robber’s trigger finger, and the gunmen ran. Police recovered the finger and were able to lift a clean fingerprint, which matched Terence Stewart, 28, who was recently released from prison after serving time for violent home-invasion robberies. (Memphis Commercial Appeal) The pen may be mightier than the sword, but sometimes the sword is the perfect tool for the job.
In 2007, The times they are a changing. For nearly 100 years, the U.S. Postal Service’s Operation Santa program has been passing along children’s Yuletide wishes to volunteers, charitable groups and corporations who want to help a deserving child. This year, the Postal Service, on the advice of legal counsel, is now requiring all volunteers in its Operation Santa program to sign a legal waiver releasing the Postal Service from liability for “all causes of action, claims, liens, rights or interest of any kind or type whatsoever.” Volunteers will have to present photo identification as well. Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, says the change was made “to protect the children and to protect the integrity of the program and the Postal Service.”
In 2007, Hackers were successful in a sophisticated phishing attempt to get into at least one non-classified database at the Oak Ridge National Lab. The lab is known to house much of the nation’s nuclear technology, but fell victim to a hacking attack when some of its staffers opened a phising email sent by cyber attackers. The lab believes the only compromised information is a database containing the names and contact information for visitors to ORNL from 1999 to 2004. The cyber attack reported last week may have originated in China, according to a confidential memorandum distributed Wednesday to public and private security officials by the Department of Homeland Security as reported by the New York Times
In 2008, The Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is arrested by federal officials for crimes including attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency.
In 2009, Gene Barry, American actor (b. 1919) at Sunrise Senior Living in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 90. He was buried at the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. His marker contains the epitaph, A Class Act. His wife, Betty, died in 2003, after 58 years of marriage. He was an American stage, screen, and television actor. Barry is best remembered for his leading roles in the films The Atomic City (1952) and The War of The Worlds (1953) and for his portrayal of the title characters in the TV series Bat Masterson and Burke’s Law, among many roles.
In 2013, At least seven are dead and 63 are injured following a train accident near Bintaro, Indonesia.
In 2015, The start of the thirty-sixth GCC summit in Riyadh business.
In 2016, President Park Geun-hye of South Korea is impeached by the country’s National Assembly in response to a major political scandal. Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn becomes Acting President, later declining to run for a full term.
In 2016, At least 57 people are killed and a further 177 injured when two schoolgirl suicide bombers attack a market area in Madagali, Northeastern Nigeria in the Madagali suicide bombings.
In 2017, Australia becomes the 26th country to cave in and legalize same-sex marriage.
