WHAT HAPPENED ON 18. DECEMBER
Want to find out what all happened on 18. December

World War II: The Battle of the Heligoland Bight, the first major air battle of the war, takes place. (18. December 1939)

World War II: 77 B-29 Superfortress and 200 other aircraft of U.S. Fourteenth Air Force bomb Hankow, China, a Japanese supply base. (18. December 1944)

Japan joins the United Nations. (18. December 1956)

Project SCORE, the world's first communications satellite, is launched. (18. December 1958)

Saturn's moon Epimetheus is discovered by Richard L. Walker. (18. December 1966)

Capital punishment in the United Kingdom: Home Secretary James Callaghan's motion to make permanent the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, which had temporarily suspended capital punishment in England, Wales and Scotland for murder (but not for all crimes) for a period of five years. (18. December 1969)

Capitol Reef National Park is established in Utah. (18. December 1971)

Vietnam War: President Richard Nixon announces that the United States will engage North Vietnam in Operation Linebacker II, a series of Christmas bombings, after peace talks collapsed with North Vietnam on the 13th. (18. December 1972)

Soviet Soyuz Programme: Soyuz 13, crewed by cosmonauts Valentin Lebedev and Pyotr Klimuk, is launched from Baikonur in the Soviet Union. (18. December 1973)

The Islamic Development Bank is founded. (18. December 1973)

Dominica joins the United Nations. (18. December 1978)

Larry Wall releases the first version of the Perl programming language. (18. December 1987)

The European Economic Community and the Soviet Union sign an agreement on trade and commercial and economic cooperation. (18. December 1989)

HTML 4.0 is published by the World Wide Web Consortium. (18. December 1997)

NASA launches into orbit the Terra platform carrying five Earth Observation instruments, including ASTER, CERES, MISR, MODIS and MOPITT. (18. December 1999)

2003 California recall: Then Governor of California Gray Davis announces that the state would face a record budget deficit of $35 billion, roughly double the figure reported during his reelection campaign one month earlier. (18. December 2002)

The civil war in Chad begins when rebel groups, allegedly backed by neighbouring Sudan, launch an attack in Adré. (18. December 2005)

The first of a series of floods strikes Malaysia. The death toll of all flooding is at least 118, with over 400,000 people displaced. (18. December 2006)

United Arab Emirates holds its first-ever elections. (18. December 2006)

Anti-government protests begin in Tunisia, heralding the Arab Spring. (18. December 2010)