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Tuesday December 11, 2012

  • 346th Day of 2012 / 20 Remaining
  • 10 Days Until The First Day of Winter

  • Sunrise:7:15
  • Sunset:4:51
  • 9 Hours 36 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise:5:17am
  • Moon Set:3:35pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 4 %

  • The Next Full Moon
  • December 28 @ 2:22 am
  • Full Cold Moon
  • Full Long Nights Moon

During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.

  • Tides
  • High: 9:14am/1:11pm
  • Low: 2:50am/4:06pm

  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:8.89
  • Last Year:3.20
  • Normal To Date:6.05
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

  • Holidays
  • Admission Day-Indiana
  • National Noodle-Ring Day

  • UN International Mountain Day
  • National Day-Burkina Faso

  • On This Day In …
  • 1816 --- The Hoosier state, Indiana, entered the United States of America as the 19th state. The nickname, meaning rustic, is not a good decription of Indianapolis, the major metropolis that is its capital. However, much of the state is still farmland, and the little state flower, the peony, grows in many Hoosier front yards. The cardinal, the state bird, is also the state bird of each of the states (except Michigan) that border Indiana: Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio.

  • 1844 --- Dr. Horace Wells became the first person to have a tooth extracted after receiving an anesthetic for the dental procedure. Nitrous Oxide, or laughing gas, was the anesthetic.

  • 1872 --- Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became America's first black governor when he took office as acting governor of Louisiana.

  • 1936 --- After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11, he gave a radio address in which he explained, "I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." On December 12, his younger brother, the duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI.

  • 1946 --- The General Assembly of the United Nations votes to establish the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an organization to help provide relief and support to children living in countries devastated by the war. After the food and medical crisis of the late 1940s passed, UNICEF continued its role as a relief organization for the children of troubled nations and during the 1970s grew into a vocal advocate of children's rights. During the 1980s, UNICEF assisted the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. After its introduction to the U.N. General Assembly in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, and UNICEF played a key role in ensuring its enforcement. Of the 184 member states of the United Nations, only two countries have failed to ratify the treaty--Somalia and the United States. Somalia does not currently have an internationally recognized government, so ratification is impossible, and the United States, which was one of the original signatories of the convention, has failed to ratify the treaty because of concerns about its potential impact on national sovereignty

  • 1962 --- The New York City Board of Estimate unanimously votes against a plan for a $100 million elevated expressway across the bottom of Manhattan. The road, known as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had been in the works since 1941. It was supposed to link the Holland Tunnel on the city's West Side with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges on the east side, slicing right through the neighborhoods now known as TriBeCa and SoHo.

  • 1964 --- The Los Angeles Police Department were dispatched to the Hacienda Motel, where they found Sam Cooke dead on the office floor, shot three times in the chest by the motel's manager, Bertha Franklin. The authorities ruled Cooke's death a case of justifiable homicide, based on the testimony of Ms. Franklin, who claimed that Cooke had threatened her life after attempting to rape a young woman with whom he had earlier checked in. Even as the lurid details of the case were becoming common knowledge, some 200,000 fans turned out in the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago to mourn the passing of Sam Cooke, a man whose legacy seemed able to transcend the scandal surrounding his death. That legacy was built during a brief but spectacular run as a singer, songwriter, producer and music publisher in the 1950s and early 1960s. "You Send Me" (1957) was Sam Cooke's first pop smash, and it was followed by such classics as "Chain Gang" (1960), "Cupid" (1961), "Twistin' the Night Away" (1962) and the Dylan-inspired posthumous release that became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement: "A Change Is Gonna Come" (1964). His voice has been called the most important in the history of soul music, but just as important to Sam Cooke's historical standing is the fact that he also wrote all of the aforementioned hits—a remarkable fact for any popular singer of his time.

  • 1967 --- The French prototype Concorde 001 was rolled out in Toulouse, France (the British 002 prototype was not quite finished in Bristol). The joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, took two more years of testing and fine-tuning the powerful engines before it made its maiden flight.

  • 1972 --- Man landed on the moon for the last time during the Apollo 17 mission.

  • 1980 --- U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed into law legislation creating $1.6 billion environmental "superfund" that would be used to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.

  • 1991 --- Salman Rushdie, under an Islamic death sentence for blasphemy, made his first public appearance since 1989 in New York, at a dinner marking the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment (which guarantees freedom of speech in the U.S.).

  • 1997 --- More than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth's "greenhouse gases."

  • 2001 --- Attorney General Ashcroft announced the first federal indictment directly related to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Zacarias Moussaoui was charged with six conspiracy charges. Moussaoui was in custody at the time of the attacks.

  • 2001 --- It was announced that U.S. President George W. Bush would withdraw the U.S. from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.

  • 2002 --- A congressional report found that intelligence agencies before Sept. 11, 2001, were poorly organized, poorly equipped and slow to pursue clues that might have prevented that day's terrorist attacks.

  • 2008 --- Bernard Madoff is arrested at his New York City apartment and charged with masterminding a long-running Ponzi scheme later estimated to involve around $65 billion, making it one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history.

  • Birthdays
  • Willie Mae Thornton
  • Rita Moreno
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Tom Hayden
  • Donna Mills
  • Lynda Day George
  • Brenda lee
  • Teri Garr
  • Jermaine Jackson
  • James Lewis Kraft
  • David Gates
  • Fiorello H. La Guardia
  • Mo'Nique
  • Mos Def
  • Pope Leo X
  • Carlo Ponti
  • Ron Carey