Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 December 24

From today's featured article

Earthrise

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...)

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St. Nikolai interior

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Damage from the Sunda Strait tsunami

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.

Du Fu

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)

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Sixty-two churches are cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust in Southwest England. The Churches Conservation Trust, which was initially known as the Redundant Churches Fund, is a charity whose purpose is to protect historic churches at risk which have been made redundant by the Church of England. The Trust was established by the Pastoral Measure of 1968. The Trust's primary aim is to ensure that the buildings in its care are weatherproof and to prevent any deterioration in their condition. The majority of the churches remain consecrated, and many are occasionally still used for worship. The churches in South West England are in the counties of Bristol, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. The majority of the churches are in villages. One of the churches is in Imber, Wiltshire, from where the entire civilian population was evicted in 1943 to provide an exercise area for American troops preparing for the invasion of Europe during the Second World War. (Full list...)

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Aida is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni. Set in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, it was commissioned by Cairo's Khedivial Opera House and had its première there on 24 December 1871, in a performance conducted by Giovanni Bottesini.

This picture shows the set for a performance of Aida by the Israeli Opera in 2011.

Photograph: Avinoam Michaeli

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