1923 -- Dying Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin dictated a postscript to a letter that has become known as his political "testament" in which he suggested Stalin was too rude to be general secretary of the Communist party and should be replaced.

1948 -- The British governor of Burma formerly handed over power and the Union of Burma was proclaimed an independent republic with U Thakin Nu as its first prime minister.

1958 -- Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union, disintegrated and fell to earth.

1960 -- Albert Camus, Algerian-born French existentialist writer, died in a car accident.

1964 -- Pope Paul VI began a visit to the Holy Land, which included the first visit by a pope to Beit-ul-moqaddas.

1965 -- T.S. Eliot, American-born English poet, playwright and Nobel Prize winner, died. He wrote "The Waste Land", "Murder in the Cathedral", and "Four Quartets".

1967 -- Donald Campbell, British car and speedboat racer, was killed on Coniston Water in England during an attempt to break the world water speed record.

1978 -- Said Hammami, the Palestine Liberation Organization's representative in Britain, was assassinated in London.

1995 -- Newt Gingrich was formally elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Republican in the post in 40 years.

2000 -- Former Ivory Coast President Henri Konan Bedie arrived in Paris to take up residence after being overthrown in a Christmas Eve coup.

2002 -- The world's oldest man, 112-year-old Antonio Todde died on the Italian island of Sardinia. In a bizarre twist of fate, Italy's oldest woman, 110-year-old Maria Grazia Broccolo, died only hours later in a small town south of Rome.

2003 -- The Raelians, a UFO cult that believes aliens landed on Earth 25,000 years ago and started the human race through cloning, said a cloned baby was born to a Dutch woman. Cloning experts however swiftly dismissed the claim as a baseless stunt.

2004 -- Rival Afghan factions attending the Loya Jarga agreed on a national constitution, paving the way for the first free elections after nearly a quarter-century of war.