DECEMBER 16th

On this date in:
1653	Oliver Cromwell became lord protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.
1773	The Boston Tea Party took place as American colonists boarded a British ship and dumped more than 300 chests of tea overboard to protest tea taxes.
1809	Napoleon Bonaparte was divorced from the Empress Josephine by an act of the French Senate.
1899	Playwright Noel Coward was born in London.
1916	Gregory Rasputin, the monk who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen.
1917	Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead, England.
1944	The Battle of the Bulge during World War II began as German forces launched a surprise counterattack against Allied forces in Belgium.
1960	A United Air Lines DC-8 and a TWA Super Constellation collided over New York City, killing 134 people.
1985	Reputed organized-crime chief Paul Castellano was shot to death outside a New York City restaurant.
1990	Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti in the country's first democratic elections.
1991	The U.N. General Assembly rescinded its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.
1998	President Bill Clinton ordered a sustained series of airstrikes against Iraq by American and British forces in response to Saddam Hussein's continued defiance of UN weapons inspectors.
2000	President-elect George W. Bush selected Colin Powell to become the first African-American secretary of state.
2007	British forces formally handed over to Iraq responsibility for Basra, the last Iraqi region under their control.

Article of the day

The Boston Tea Party

In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

The midnight raid, popularly known as the "Boston Tea Party," was in protest of the British Parliament's Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny.

When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbor, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the "tea party" with about 60 members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. The British tea dumped in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16 was valued at some $18,000.

Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

Today Birthdays

Benjamin Bratt turns 45 years old today.

AP Photo/Chris Pizzello Actor Benjamin Bratt turns 45 years old today.

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