Dec. 27, 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.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1822

Scientist Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, France.

1831

Naturalist Charles Darwin set out on a round-the-world voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

1904

James Barrie’s play “Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” opened at the Duke of York’s Theater in London.

1945

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were formally established.

1949

Queen Juliana of the Netherlands signed an act recognizing Indonesia’s sovereignty after more than three centuries of Dutch rule.

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.

1968

Apollo 8 and its three astronauts made a safe, nighttime splashdown in the Pacific.

1979

Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal.

1985

Palestinian guerrillas opened fire inside the Rome and Vienna airports; 19victims were killed, plus four attackers who 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.

1994

Four Roman Catholic priests — three French and a Belgian — were shot to death in their rectory in Algiers, a day after French commandos killed four radicals who’d hijacked an Air France jet from Algiers to Marseille.