December 16 ...

In 1653 Oliver Cromwell became lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1770 composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany. In 1773 the Boston Tea Party took place when American colonists boarded British ships and dumped nearly 350 chests of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of taxes on tea. In 1901 The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter, was printed for the first time. In 1916 Gregory Rasputin, the monk who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen. In 1944 the Battle of the Bulge began in Belgium, as the Germans took the Allies completely by surprise in the last major German counteroffensive of WWII. In 1950 President Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight "Communist imperialism." In 1980 Harland Sanders, founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain, died in Shelbyville, KY, at age 90. In 1991 the UN General Assembly rescinded its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism by a vote of 111-25. In 1998 the US and Britain fired hundreds of missiles on Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein's refusal to comply with UN weapons inspectors. In 2000 researchers announced that information from NASA's Galileo spacecraft indicated that one of Jupiter's moons, Ganymede, the solar system's largest, appeared to have a liquid saltwater ocean beneath a surface of solid ice. In 2001 tribal fighters announced that they had taken the last al-Qaeda positions in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, killing more than 200 fighters and capturing 25; they also announced that they had found no sign of Osama bin Laden. Also on this day, the British newspaper The Observer reported that a notebook containing a "blue print" for an bomb attack on London's financial district had been found at an al-Qaeda training camp in southern Afghanistan.