1511: Pope Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) forms the “Holy League” with Spain, England and Venice to expel the French under King Louis XII. from Northern Italy.
1836: After a five-year trip around the world with the research vessel “HMS Beagle”, the English biologist Charles Darwin is setting foot on English soil again. During this time he developed his theory of evolution, “Darwinism”.
1926: After two bans, the German authorities cleared the film “Battleship Potemkin” by the Soviet director Sergej Eisenstein for showing. The film is about the sailors’ uprising in Russia in 1905.
1941: The Army Group Center of the German Wehrmacht opens the attack on Moscow (“Operation Taifun”). After German troops came within a few kilometers of the outskirts, the Soviet counter-offensive began on December 5th.
1986: After the US House of Representatives, the Senate is also overriding President Ronald Reagan’s veto against South Africa sanctions, which can then come into force.
1991: Austronaut Franz Viehböck (30) takes off into space with a Soviet Soyuz rocket at 6.59 a.m. CET together with his commander Alexander Wolkow (43) and Kazakhs Tachtar Aubakirow (45). Eight and a half hours later, his daughter Carina-Marie is born in Wiener Neustadt.
1991: In Istanbul, the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I, the honorary head of all Orthodox Christianity, dies of heart failure. He was elected successor to Athenagoras I in 1972.
2006: The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine goes to the two US RNA researchers Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello. You will be honored for discovering how double-stranded RNA genome can specifically suppress the activity of genes using a process now known as RNA interference.
2006: During a rampage in a village school of the Amish religious community in the US state of Pennsylvania, a 32-year-old man kills five girls and then himself.
2011: Kiss bassist and singer Gene Simmons is under the hood. The 62-year-old says yes to his girlfriend Shannon Tweed at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles after 28 years together.
Birthdays: Ferdinand Foch, French Marshal (1851-1929); Cordell Hull, US politician (1871-1955); Roy Campbell, South Afr. Poet (1901-1957); Robert Runcie, British theologian, Archbishop of Canterbury (1921-2000); Achille Casanova, black. Politician (1941-2016); Sting (real. Gordon Matthew Sumner), British rock musician (“Police”) (1951); Romina Power, US singer, actress, presenter and painter; “Al Bano & Romina Power” (1951); Xavier Naidoo, German pop singer (1971).
Days of Death: Wilhelm Kubitschek, east. Ancient historian, classical archaeologist and numismatist (1858-1936); Dimitrios I (Papadopoulos), Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Head of World Orthodoxy (1914-1991); Joonas Kokkonen, Finnish composer (1921-1996); Sir Neville Marriner, British conductor (1924-2016).
Name days: Leodegar, Amandus, Gottfried, Hermann, Jakob, Thomas, Cyprian, Theophil.