On This Day:
Friday December 27, 2013 This is the 361st day of the year, with 4 days remaining in 2013. Fact of the Day: New York Public Library The famous pair of marble lions that sit by the stairs of The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan are named Patience (south side) and Fortitude (north side). They were so named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s to give New Yorkers a sense of survival during the Depression. However, these are not the original names for the lions. They were first named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, in honor of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox, founders of the New York Public Library. Then they were called Lord Astor and Lady Lenox (both lions are males), before being given the names Patience and Fortitude.
Holidays Feast day of St. John the Evangelist (or Apostle), St. Fabiola, Saints Theodore and Theophanes Graptoi, and St. Nicarete.
Hong Kong: Ta Chiu.
Events 1831 - British naturalist Charles Darwin set out from Plymouth, England, aboard the HMS Beagle, on a five-year surveying expedition of the southern Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean.
1900 - Militant prohibitionist Carry A. Nation performed her first public smashing of a bar, at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, Kansas.
1927 - Defeated in his struggle for power against Josef Stalin, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.
1932 - Radio City Music Hall opened in New York City.
1945 - Twenty-eight nations signed an agreement to create the World Bank. The International Monetary Fund and the Bank for Reconstruction and Development were created.
1945 - After World War II, the former Allied nations of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed to divide Korea into two occupation zones and govern them for five years. The country was split along the 38th parallel, with Soviet forces occupying the northern zone, and Americans stationed to the south. In 1948 self-rule was granted with the establishment of two separate regimes in North Korea and South Korea.
1947 - The children's television program "Howdy Doody" made its debut.
1968 - Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, returned safely to Earth.
1978 - King Juan Carlos ratified Spain's first democratic constitution in nearly five decades.
1979 - Soviet Union forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal. It was the beginning of a 10-year war.
1996 - Muslim fundamentalist Taliban forces retook the strategic air base of Bagram, solidifying their buffer zone around Kabul, the Afghanistan capital.
2002 - North Korea ordered U.N. nuclear inspectors to leave the country and said it would restart a laboratory capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
2004 - In a run-off election, opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko declared victory in Ukraine's fiercely contested presidential election.
Births 1571 - Johannes Kepler, German astronomer.
1822 - Louis Pasteur, French scientist who developed pasteurization process, rabies vaccination.
1901 - Marlene Dietrich (Maria von Losch), German-born actress.
1926 - Lee Salk, American child psychologist.
Deaths 1981 - Hoagy Carmichael, American composer, singer, and pianist.
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