This day in history
Today is Friday, Dec. 16, the 350th day of 2022. There are 15 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Civil rights attorney and co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center Morris Dees is 86. Actor Joyce Bulifant is 85. Actor Liv Ullmann is 84. CBS news correspondent Lesley Stahl is 81. ZZ Top singer-guitarist Billy Gibbons is 73. Actor Krysten Ritter is 41. Actor Theo James is 38. Actor Anna Popplewell is 34.
ºIn 1653, Oliver Cromwell became lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
ºIn 1773, the Boston Tea Party took place as American colonists boarded a British ship and dumped more than 300 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest tea taxes.
ºIn 1884, French-Canadian Roman Catholic parishioners in Fall River barred the newly assigned priest from their church because he was Irish, saying they would “stand on the brink of hell’’ before they would submit to an Irishman, according to MassHumanities. The diocese eventually closed the church.
ºIn 1944, the World War II Battle of the Bulge began as German forces launched a surprise attack against Allied forces through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg (the Allies were eventually able to turn the Germans back).
ºIn 1950, President Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight “world conquest by Communist imperialism.”
ºIn 1960, 134 people were killed when a United Air Lines DC-8 and a TWA Super Constellation collided over New York City.
ºIn 1991, the UN General Assembly rescinded its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism by a vote of 111-25.
ºIn 2000, President-elect George W. Bush selected Colin Powell to become the first African-American secretary of state.
ºIn 2012, President Obama visited Newtown, Conn., the scene of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre; after meeting privately with victims’ families, the president told an evening vigil he would use “whatever power” he had to prevent future shootings. A 23-yearold woman was brutally raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi, a crime that triggered widespread protests in India. (The woman died 13 days later.)
ºIn 2014, Taliban gunmen stormed a military-run school in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, killing at least 148 people, mostly children.
ºIn 2019, House Democrats laid out their first impeachment case against President Trump; a sweeping report from the House Judiciary Committee said Trump had “betrayed the Nation by abusing his high office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections.”
ºIn 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccinations were underway at US nursing homes, where the virus had killed 110,000 people.
ºLast year, a federal judge rejected OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s sweeping deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids; the judge found flaws in the way the bankruptcy settlement protected members of the Sackler family who owned the company from lawsuits.