5. Dezember

Weeks earlier the emperor Charles IV had granted the city leave to pull down the Jewish quarter for a market square. 562 people were killed, by the count of the Memorbuch. The Frauenkirche was built on the site of the synagogue.

He died just before one in the morning, aged 35, the Requiem unfinished. The parish register gives “severe miliary fever”; modern guesses run from rheumatic fever to kidney failure. Constanze had it finished, mainly by Süssmayr, and delivered to Walsegg as Mozart’s own. The poisoning story began…

He died at thirty-five in his apartment in the Rauhensteingasse. The Requiem had been commissioned anonymously by Count Franz von Walsegg, who meant to pass it off as his own; Mozart’s pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed it.

Berlioz printed a programme for the audience: an artist’s opium dream about his beloved, a thinly veiled Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress he had fallen for and married in 1833. A tune he called the idée fixe stands for her in every movement.

The Norwegian whaling captains warned that the ice had come unusually far north that season. Shackleton waited a month, took an extra deck-load of coal and extra clothing from the stations, and began to plan for wintering the ship in the ice.

Anchor up at 8.45 a.m. on 5 December, the last link with civilization. Two days later, at 57° south, she met pack much farther north than expected. Six weeks of dodging floes took her past Coats Land and along 200 miles of new coast, which Shackleton named the Caird Coast after his chief backer.

Four years after women won the municipal vote, the Assembly amended the constitution to let them vote and stand nationally. At the February 1935 election, in a one-party state, 17 women entered the Assembly.

In dawn raids across the country police arrested 156 people of every race, Mandela at his home in Orlando, and held them in the Johannesburg Fort. The charge was a conspiracy to overthrow the state by violence, with the Freedom Charter as evidence of communist intent.

The state dropped the charges against most of the accused, and from 1958 tried the last thirty in a converted synagogue in Pretoria. After more than four years the three judges found all thirty not guilty: the prosecution had not shown that the ANC meant to overthrow the state by violence.

Police arrested 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance, of every race, and charged them with a communist plot to overthrow the state, with the Freedom Charter as evidence. The case against most fell away; the last few dozen were tried in a converted synagogue in Pretoria and all acquitted after four…

Pushed by California’s 1990 zero-emission mandate, General Motors leased its electric two-seater in California and Arizona. When the leases ran out GM took back almost all 1,117 cars and crushed them, though drivers offered to buy them.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? — Alan Greenspan A rhetorical question deep in a dinner speech. Markets in Tokyo fell 3 per cent…

He was ninety-five. President Jacob Zuma announced that he had died peacefully at about 8.50 pm, with his family around him. At the memorial at Soccer City on 10 December, dozens of heads of state spoke or sat in the rain.

DeepMind’s preprint described a program given only the rules, which learned by playing itself and passed the strength of the leading engine, Stockfish, within four hours of training. After nine hours it played Stockfish a 100-game match, winning 28 and drawing 72. Critics noted that Stockfish had…

A fireball over South Australia, then a capsule found by its radio beacon. It held about 5.4 grams of Ryugu, where later analysis found uracil, one of the letters of RNA.

The first fine under the Digital Services Act: €120 million for a paid blue checkmark that deceived users about who was verified, an opaque advertising archive, and blocking researchers from public data.