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News
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Aftermath of the Magdeburg car attack
- A car attack (aftermath pictured) at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, kills five people and injures more than two hundred others.
- In France, Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men are convicted of the serial rape of his then-wife Gisèle Pelicot.
- A 7.3-magnitude earthquake hits Vanuatu's capital, Port Vila, leaving at least sixteen people dead.
- Cyclone Chido leaves more than 160 people dead in southeast Africa.
On this day
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Christmas Island (Kiritimati)
- 759 – The Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu departed for Chengdu, where he lived for the next five years and composed poems about life in his thatched cottage.
- 1777 – An expedition led by English explorer James Cook reached Christmas Island (pictured), the largest coral atoll in the world.
- 1814 – The United Kingdom and the United States signed a peace treaty in Ghent, present-day Belgium, ending the War of 1812.
- 1987 – About 20,000 protesters marched in a civil rights demonstration in Forsyth County, Georgia, United States.
- 1999 – Jihadists linked to al-Qaeda hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 to force the release of Islamist figures held in prison in India.
- Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik (d. 738)
- George Crabbe (b. 1754)
- Adam Exner (b. 1928)
- Turid Birkeland (d. 2015)
More anniversaries:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an American silent film directed by Stuart Paton and released on December 24, 1916. Based primarily on the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne, the film also incorporates elements from Verne's 1875 novel The Mysterious Island. This was the first motion picture filmed underwater. Actual underwater cameras were not used, but a system of watertight tubes and mirrors allowed the camera to shoot reflected images of underwater scenes staged in shallow sunlit waters in the Bahamas. For the scene featuring a battle with an octopus, cinematographer John Ernest Williamson devised a viewing chamber called the "photosphere", a 6-by-10-foot (1.8-by-3.0-metre) steel globe in which a cameraman could be placed. The film was made by the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (now Universal Pictures), not then known as a major motion picture studio, and took two years to make, at the cost of $500,000.Film credit: Stuart Paton