Today’s Highlight in History:
On Dec. 27, 1979, Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin (hah-FEE’-zoo-lah ah-MEEN’), who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal.
On this date:
In 1822, scientist Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, France.
In 1831, naturalist Charles Darwin set out on a round-the-world voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.
In 1904, James Barrie’s play “Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” opened at the Duke of York’s Theater in London.
In 1932, New York City’s Radio City Music Hall first opened.
In 1945, 28 nations signed an agreement creating the World Bank.
In 1958, American physicist James Van Allen reported the discovery of a second radiation belt around Earth, in addition to one found earlier in the year.
In 1985, Palestinian gunmen opened fire inside the Rome and Vienna airports in terrorist attacks that killed 19 people; four attackers were slain by police and security personnel. American naturalist Dian Fossey, 53, who had studied gorillas in the wild in Rwanda, was found hacked to death.
In 1995, Israeli jeeps sped out of the West Bank town of Ramallah, capping a seven-week pullout giving Yasser Arafat control over 90 percent of the West Bank’s 1 million Palestinian residents and one-third of its land.
In 1999, space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew returned to Earth after fixing the Hubble Space Telescope.
In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners would be held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In 2002, a defiant North Korea ordered U.N. nuclear inspectors to leave the country and said it would restart a laboratory capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons; the U.N. nuclear watchdog said its inspectors were “staying put” for the time being.
In 2012, retired Army general Norman Schwarzkopf, who as head of United States Central Command led forces against Iraq in the Gulf War, died in Tampa, Florida at age 78.
In 2016, actor Carrie Fisher died in a hospital four days after suffering a medical emergency aboard a flight to Los Angeles; she was 60. (Her mother, Debbie Reynolds, would die the following day.)
In 2021, U.S. health officials cut isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans infected with the coronavirus from 10 to five days, and similarly shortened the time that close contacts needed to quarantine.