Today is Saturday, Dec. 9, the 343rd day of 2023.
There are 22 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
In 1965, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the first animated TV special featuring characters from the “Peanuts” comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, premiered on CBS.
On this date:
In 1854, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” was published in England.
In 1911, an explosion inside the Cross Mountain coal mine near Briceville, Tennessee, killed 84 workers.
In 1917, British forces captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks.
In 1987, the first Palestinian intefadeh, or uprising, began as riots broke out in Gaza and spread to the West Bank, triggering a strong Israeli response.
In 1990, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa (lek vah-WEN’-sah) won Poland’s presidential runoff by a landslide.
In 1992, Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana announced their separation. (The couple’s divorce became final in August 1996.)
In 2000, the U-S Supreme Court ordered a temporary halt in the Florida vote count on which Al Gore pinned his best hopes of winning the White House.
In 2006, a fire broke out at a Moscow drug treatment hospital, killing 46 women trapped by barred windows and a locked gate.
In 2011, the European Union said 26 of its 27 member countries were open to joining a new treaty tying their finances together to solve the euro crisis; Britain remained opposed.
In 2012, Mexican-American singer Jenni Rivera, 43, and six others were killed in a plane crash in northern Mexico.
In 2013, scientists revealed that NASA’s Curiosity rover had uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars.
In 2014, U.S. Senate investigators concluded the United States had brutalized scores of terror suspects with interrogation tactics that turned secret CIA prisons into chambers of suffering and that it did nothing to make Americans safer after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
In 2020, commercial flights with Boeing 737 Max jetliners resumed for the first time since they were grounded worldwide nearly two years earlier following two deadly accidents; Brazil’s Gol Airlines became the first in the world to return the planes to its active fleet.
In 2021, a jury in Chicago convicted former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett on charges he staged an anti-gay, racist attack on himself and then lied to Chicago police about it.