Today is the 359th day of 2025. There are six days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1992: Christmas brings peace, at least temporarily, to war-torn parts of the world: A ceasefire holds in Northern Ireland; fighting subsides in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo; and French and American soldiers secure a Somali town without firing a shot.

OTHER EVENTS

221: Christmas is celebrated on this day, having been first identified as the date of Jesus’s birth by Sextus Julius Africanus in 221.

352: Pope Liberius celebrates the first official Christmas mass in Rome; the birth of Jesus Christ had been celebrated as many as two centuries earlier but it is this mass that ensures Christmas’s place on December 25 on the Roman Catholic calendar.

1223: St Francis of Assisi assembles one of the first Nativity scenes, in Greccio, Italy.

1741: Astronomer Anders Celsius introduces the Centigrade temperature scale.

1760: Jupiter Hammon, an African American slave, composes poetry broadside An Evening Thought — this is believed to be the first poetry published by an African American.

1818: The Christmas carol Silent Night is sung for first time in the Austrian village of Oberndorff.

1896: Patriotic march The Stars and Stripes Forever is composed by John Philip Sousa.

1917: A football game takes place in Argonne Forest, during World War I, between German soldiers on one side and British, Canadian and American soldiers on the other.

1931: New York’s Metropolitan Opera broadcasts an entire live opera performance for the first time — Englebert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, over NBC radio.

1940: Cricket master batsman Don Bradman is dismissed for a Christmas Day first-ball duck (0) during a South Australia v Victoria Sheffield Shield match at the Adelaide Oval.

1941: Bing Crosby debuts Irving Berlin’s White Christmas on The Kraft Music Hall radio programme; Crosby later records the song for the film Holiday Inn (1942) and it wins an Oscar, becoming one of the most popular songs in American history.

1957: A 17-year old Liverpudlian, Richard Starkey (later known as Ringo Starr) receives his first drum set as a Christmas gift from his stepfather.

1962: The film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird premieres and becomes a classic, especially noted for Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch.

1964: Beatle guitarist George Harrison’s girlfriend Pattie Boyd is attacked by female Beatle fans.

1967: Paul McCartney of The Beatles and British actress Jane Asher get engaged but the engagement is publicly broken six months later.

1974: An airlift begins to evacuate victims of the cyclone that struck Darwin, Australia, destroying 90 per cent of the city and killing 47 in the worst natural catastrophe in Australia’s history.

1977: Charlie Chaplin, the British comedic actor and director widely regarded as one of the most important figures in motion-picture history, dies in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.

1983: The first live telecast of the Christmas Parade at the Epcot Centre, Disney World, Florida, is aired.

1989: Leonard Bernstein conducts Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 in East Berlin’s Schauspielhaus to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is broadcast worldwide to an audience of 100 million.

1991: Mikhail Gorbachev resigns the presidency of the Soviet Union, which ceases to exist at the end of the year.

1996: Tropical Storm Greg claims the lives of more than 200 people in the Sabah, Malaysia region, many of whom are washed away in flood waters; hardest hit is Keningau where more than 100 corpses are found under debris or floating in rivers.

1997: For the first time, United States movie box office receipts pass US$6 billion.

2002: Russia and Iran agree to speed up completion of a nuclear power plant; the United States opposes this, fearing Iran will use the plant to develop nuclear weapons.

2005: Libya’s Supreme Court overturns the convictions of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been found guilty of infecting hundreds of children with HIV and had been sentenced to death; a new trial is ordered be held.

2006: American singer and songwriter James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul”, dies at 73.

2007: About 40 Iranian Jews complete a covert escape from Iran, hoping to build new lives in Israel after fleeing a hard-line regime that repeatedly called for the Jewish State’s destruction.

2008: The Jamaica National Heritage Trust declares Chebuctoo Great House, in Westmoreland, a national monument. Phil Jackson becomes the sixth coach in National Basketball Association history to win 1,000 games as his LA Lakers beat the Boston Celtics 92-83 at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, USA.

2009: Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo is sentenced to 11 years in prison in Beijing, China, for “inciting subversion of State power”. A Nigerian man who said he was an agent for al-Qaeda tries to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane with 289 people aboard as it was preparing to land in Detroit, but travellers who smelled smoke and heard what sounded like firecrackers rush to subdue him.

2010: A burqa-clad female suicide bomber in Pakistan lobs hand grenades then detonates her explosive belt among a crowd at an aid centre, killing at least 45 people in militants’ latest strike against the authorities’ control over the key tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

2012: Pope Benedict XVI, in his Christmas message, calls for an end to the slaughter in Syria and for more meaningful negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis.

2013: The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, is released.

2021: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America — in a joint effort with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency.

2024: Baltimore Ravens’ Lamar Jackson breaks the National Football League career rushing record for quarterbacks in a 31-2 win over the Texans in Houston; he runs for 87 yards, pushing his career rushing total to 6,110.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sir Isaac Newton, English scientist-mathematician (1783-1814); Clara Barton, US founder of the American Red Cross (1821-1912)

— AP/ Britannica/ Onthisday.com / Jamaica Observer/