7 december

At the consecration of the orphanage church on the Rennweg, with Maria Theresa present, the twelve-year-old conducted his own mass, probably the Missa solemnis in C minor, K. 139.

After Gluck’s death Joseph II gave Mozart a court title at 800 florins a year, less than half Gluck’s salary. His main duty turned out to be dances for the court’s masked balls.

Unanimously, 30 to 0. Small states liked their equal vote in the Senate.

A log stockade named for the Clatsop, whose land it stood on. It rained on all but twelve days. The men hunted elk, the captains wrote up their natural history, and everyone traded with the Clatsop and Chinook, shrewd dealers who had bargained with ships’ captains for years.

Beaten back from Baghdad at Ctesiphon, General Townshend’s division dug in at Kut and was besieged for 147 days. Relief attempts failed, and about 13,000 British and Indian soldiers surrendered. Thousands of them died in captivity.

Japan struck Malaya, Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and Hong Kong within hours, and in six months held an empire from Burma to the Solomon Islands. After Midway the Americans fought back island by island. Japan lost 2.1 million servicemen and, by the National WWII Museum’s count, 2.6 to 3.1 million…

353 aircraft from six carriers struck the US Pacific Fleet in two waves from just before eight on a Sunday morning. They sank or wrecked eight battleships and killed 2,403 Americans. The landing in Malaya had begun about an hour before, and the fleet’s aircraft carriers were at sea.

The space-telescope eraOrbiting Astronomical Observatory 2

Above the air, stars stop twinkling, and the ultraviolet, X-rays and most of the infrared that the atmosphere swallows come into view. Lyman Spitzer argued for it in 1946; OAO-2, launched in December 1968, was the first to work, and Hubble made the idea famous.

On the day he signed a treaty accepting Poland’s western border, the West German chancellor laid a wreath at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and fell to his knees in silence.

Gorbachev told the General Assembly that the Soviet Union would cut its armed forces by 500,000 men, without asking anything in return, and that every nation must be free to choose its own way.

After treatment for tuberculosis he was moved to a warder’s cottage inside a prison farm near Paarl, with a swimming pool and a warder, Jack Swart, to cook for him. There he held secret talks with a committee of officials led by the intelligence chief Niël Barnard, and finished his law degree by…

A new 1,000-game match against Stockfish 8 at tournament time controls: 155 wins, 6 losses and 839 draws. In the same issue Kasparov called chess “a drosophila of reasoning” and welcomed the program’s dynamic style.

President Macron promised a rebuilding in five years. The roof and spire were remade as they had been, in oak shaped by hand, from about a thousand trees felled in French forests, and the lead dust was cleaned from every surface inside.

Five years and eight months after the fire, the archbishop of Paris knocked on the west doors with his crozier and the cathedral reopened; the new altar was consecrated at the first Mass the next morning. The Crown of Thorns, carried out of the burning building in 2019, has a new reliquary in the…