December 2

Edward’s eldest son led an Anglo-Gascon army from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean and back, some 1,000 kilometres, burning towns and villages all the way. The walled Cité of Carcassonne held out, but its lower town was burned, and Narbonne’s after it. Rogers counts the raid among the most…

Twenty when his father Piero died, Lorenzo ran Florence as his grandfather had, wrote poems and carnival songs, and kept the peace of Italy by balancing Milan, Naples and the pope. The bank, meanwhile, was failing: its branches in London and Bruges closed on bad loans.

Signed with Germany and her allies in their eastern headquarters. The Soviet delegation took along a worker, a sailor, a soldier, a woman and a peasant picked up on a station platform on the way, to show whom it spoke for.

Under the stands of Stagg Field, Enrico Fermi’s team drew the last control rod out of Chicago Pile-1, a stack of graphite and uranium, and ran the first controlled nuclear chain reaction for 28 minutes. Arthur Compton phoned Washington in code: “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”

Under the west stands of the university’s football field stood 57 layers of graphite bricks, lumped with uranium, controlled by cadmium rods. From 09:45 Chicago time Fermi had the rods withdrawn step by step, checking the neutron count against his slide rule. About 49 people watched.

At 11:25 the automatic safety rod slammed in, set to trip too low. Fermi announced: “I’m hungry. Let’s go to lunch.” The group came back at two.

At 15:25 Chicago time the count kept climbing: “The reaction is self-sustaining.” Fermi let it run for 28 minutes at half a watt. Leona Woods, 23, the only woman present, had built its neutron counters. Arthur Compton phoned James Conant: “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”

He and nineteen other leaders of the campaign were tried under the Suppression of Communism Act, which defined communism to cover almost any protest. The judge, Frans Rumpff, accepted that they had urged their followers to avoid violence and gave nine months, suspended. Banning orders soon…

The first soft landing on Mars. The lander transmitted for about 20 seconds and fell silent, in the middle of a planet-wide dust storm. NASA’s Mariner 9 had beaten it into orbit by 18 days.

Five days after Mars 2 crashed, the first human object on Mars, the Mars 3 lander came down softly into the dust storm. It began sending a picture and stopped after about 20 seconds. Nothing recognisable came through.

George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met aboard the Soviet liner Maxim Gorkiy in a storm that kept the ships apart. Gorbachev told the press: “I assured the President of the United States that the Soviet Union would never start a hot war against the United States of America.”

Endeavour’s crew made five spacewalks, a record at the time. They fitted COSTAR, a box of small corrective mirrors on arms, and a new camera with the error ground into its own optics. The before-and-after pictures in January showed that the fix had worked.

Five spacewalks by Story Musgrave, Jeffrey Hoffman, Kathryn Thornton and Tom Akers put in COSTAR, a set of corrective mirrors, and a new Wide Field and Planetary Camera with the correction built in. The first pictures came back sharp in January 1994.

Qatar won the vote in December 2010 and built seven new stadiums, a metro and a city with a workforce of migrants tied to their employers under the kafala system. How many died is disputed. The Guardian counted 6,500 deaths of workers from five South Asian countries in Qatar from 2010 to 2020,…

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency gave temporary authorisation to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the first mRNA vaccine approved for use anywhere.