TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2018

On this day in history:

1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium.

1921 - The Catholic Irish Free State became a self-governing dominion of Great Britain.

1941 - Winston Churchill became the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the US Congress.

1943 - The German battlecruiser Scharnhorst was sunk in the North Sea, during the Battle of North Cape.

1945 - The first Sydney to Hobart yacht race is held.

1947 - The territory of Heard and McDonald Islands is transferred from Britain to Australia.

1956 - Fidel Castro attempted a secret landing in Cuba to overthrow the Batista regime. All but 11 of his supporters were killed.

1990 - Garry Kasparov beat Anatoly Karpov to retain the chess championship.

1991 - The Soviet Union’s parliament formally voted the country out of existence.

1995 - Israel turned dozens of West Bank villages over to the Palestinian Authority.

1998 - Iraq announced that it would fire on US and British warplanes that patrol the skies over northern and southern Iraq.

1999 - Alfonso Portillo, a populist lawyer, won Guatemala’s first peacetime presidential elections in 40 years.

2004 - Under the Indian Ocean, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent 500-mph waves across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. The tsunami killed at least 283,000 people in a dozen countries, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand and India. Birthdays

Thomas Gray 1716

Juan Lovera 1778 Laurent Clerc 1785 Charles Babbage 1792Mathematician and inventor, he is regarded as the pioneer of modern computers. Goerge Dewey 1837 Henry Miller (Valentine) 1891 Writer

Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) 1893- Chinese statesman

Richard Widmark 1914 Actor

Steve Allen 1921 - Comedian, actor, composer.

Donald Moffat 1930 - Actor