Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 December 24

Apollo 8 (December 21–27, 1968) was the second crewed mission in the United States Apollo space program and the first to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. The three-astronaut crew – Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders – were the first people to witness and photograph an Earthrise (pictured) and to escape the gravity of another celestial body. The third flight of the Saturn V rocket, the mission was also the first human spaceflight launched from the Kennedy Space Center, adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Apollo 8 took almost three days to travel to the Moon, and orbited it ten times over the course of 20 hours. In orbit, the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast, reading the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. (Full article...)

• ... that the church of St. Nikolai, the oldest building of Kiel, was destroyed in World War II and restored with a simpler interior (pictured)?
• ... that Ant-Man and the Wasp was the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film to feature a female character in its title?
• ... that in the 1860s, Charles Hunter added a needle to the design of the syringe and coined the name "hypodermic"?
• ... that with more than 120 kilometres (75 mi) of passages, Bullita Cave is one of the longest known caves in Australia?
• ... that Stephen L. Dubuisson served in the French Army before becoming the President of Georgetown College in 1825?
• ... that the editors of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos found that the Nazis and their allies had imprisoned and murdered people at 42,500 locations, far more than previously thought?
• ... that Clémentine Touré coached the Ivory Coast women's national football team in their first matches outside Africa at the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup?
• ... that the leopard eel is neither a leopard nor an eel?

• A tsunami hits Sunda Strait, Indonesia, killing at least 281 people and injuring more than 1,000 others (aftermath pictured).
• In field hockey, the World Cup concludes with Belgium defeating the Netherlands in the final.
• The Balangiga bells, taken by US Army soldiers from the Philippines in 1901 as war trophies, are repatriated.
• Nine people are killed when a high-speed train collides with a locomotive in Ankara, Turkey.

December 24

• 759 – Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (pictured) departed for Chengdu, staying with his fellow poet Pei Di, where he composed poems about life in his thatched cottage.
• 1818 – "Silent Night", a Christmas carol by Josef Mohr and Franz Gruber, was first performed in a church in Austria.
• 1913 – Seventy-three people were crushed to death in a stampede after someone falsely yelled "fire" at a crowded Christmas party in Calumet, Michigan, U.S.
• 1953 – On New Zealand's North Island, at Tangiwai, a railway bridge was damaged by a lahar and collapsed beneath a passenger train, killing 151 people.
• 2008 – The Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group, began attacks on several villages in Haut-Uele District, Democratic Republic of the Congo, resulting in at least 400 deaths and numerous atrocities.

Yang Bin (d. 950) · Leonaert Bramer (b. 1596) · Pernilla Wahlgren (b. 1967)