On October 13, 2010, the Last of 33 Trapped Chilean Miners Emerged After 69 Days Underground

On Dec. 23, 2003, the USDA announced the first case of mad cow disease in the United States, and a Washington dairy cow upended the global beef trade Two days before Christmas, one Holstein cow turned a quiet holiday week into a test of American food safety and trade. Dec. 23, 2003, was supposed to be a slow news day before the holidays. Instead, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman stepped to a podium in Washington, D.C., with news officials had long insisted was unlikely: a dairy cow in Washington state had tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. It was the first confirmed case on American soil. One Cow, Many Borders   The animal was a Holstein dairy cow that had been slaughtered earlier that month at a plant in Washington state. It had been unable to walk, which is why it was sampled for testing, and a USDA lab in Ames, Iowa, flagged the result. Veneman told reporters that the meat from the cow had gone into the food supply, but that the brain, spinal cord and other tissues associated with the disease had been removed. Officials stressed that the risk to consumers was extremely low. The disease had been tied in Britain to a fatal human illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which gave the announcement a weight far beyond a single farm. American officials had spent years describing the country's safeguards as strong, and for a few hours before Christmas, that claim was put to its first real public test. The cow, it turned out, had been sampled precisely because the system was designed to look for it. The economic shock came fast. Within days, more than 30 countries restricted imports of American beef, including Japan and South Korea, two of the industry's most valuable customers, in a trade worth roughly $3 billion a year. Investigators later traced the cow to Canada, which reframed the story as a North American problem rather than a purely domestic one. The USDA soon announced new safeguards, including a ban on using so-called downer cattle for human food, a rule that would have kept this very cow out of the supply. The episode ended with an odd kind of reassurance: the nation's first case arrived on the same day it was caught, and a Christmas week scare produced the tightening of rules that had, until then, been declared sufficient.  

On December 13, 2012, a Chinese Moon Probe on an Unplanned Second Career Flew Past the Asteroid Toutatis Chang'e 2 had already finished its lunar job, so China sent it deep into space to photograph one of the solar system's most awkward-looking rocks. On Dec. 13, 2012, a spacecraft built to orbit the Moon passed within a few kilometers of an asteroid. Chang'e 2 was a Chinese lunar probe that had launched in 2010. By the time it reached Toutatis, it was more than seven million kilometers from home and well past the end of its original assignment. The flyby made China the fourth space program, after the United States, Europe and Japan, to photograph an asteroid up close. The Bonus Mission   Chang'e 2 launched in October 2010 as a scouting vehicle for China's lunar program, and it mapped the Moon's surface in fine detail from a low orbit. Once that work was done in 2011, its engineers could have let it idle. Instead they sent it toward Lagrange point L2, a gravitationally balanced spot far beyond the Moon on the side of Earth facing away from the Sun. From there the craft was steered toward Toutatis, an asteroid that swings through the inner solar system on a roughly four-year orbit and passes close to Earth's own path. Toutatis is a known tumbler, spinning around more than one axis at once, which makes it hard to study from a distance. A probe designed for lunar mapping had ended up being China's first deep-space asteroid scout, and nobody had put that on the original mission plan. Chinese space officials announced that the encounter took place on Dec. 13, 2012, and the probe's camera returned a series of images as it passed. They showed Toutatis as an elongated, lumpy body more than four kilometers long, with a pronounced neck-like narrowing and a surface strewn with boulders and craters. The pictures let scientists compare long-held radar-based models of the asteroid with direct views, and they offered clues that it may be made of two joined pieces. Chang'e 2 then flew on, becoming a spacecraft with no destination left on its itinerary, still sending signals from deeper and deeper in space. The probe built to study the neighbor next door ended up with a snapshot of a stranger passing through.  

On December 11, 2020, the FDA Authorized the First COVID-19 Vaccine for Emergency Use in the United States Less than a year after the virus was first identified, a late-Friday regulatory decision opened the door to the biggest vaccination effort the country had ever attempted. On Friday, Dec. 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, making it the first COVID-19 vaccine cleared for use in the United States. The decision came on a winter evening when the country was recording some of its highest daily death tolls of the pandemic. The Green Light   The authorization followed a meeting of the FDA's outside advisory committee the previous day, where independent experts voted 17 to 4, with one abstention, to back the vaccine for people 16 and older. The agency's review rested on a large clinical trial that found the two-dose regimen to be about 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19. Acting Commissioner Stephen Hahn signed off, and the agency described the action as the first emergency use authorization of a COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine, made with messenger RNA technology that had never before been used in an approved vaccine, had moved from genetic sequence to regulatory clearance at a pace without precedent. Earlier vaccines had typically taken a decade or more to develop. The shots still needed to travel, however, and they had to be kept at ultra-cold temperatures, a logistical puzzle that required specialized freezers and carefully planned shipping long before the paperwork was complete. Distribution began almost immediately. Shipments left Pfizer's Kalamazoo, Michigan, facility over the weekend, and the first vaccinations in the United States were administered on Monday, Dec. 14, to health care workers. Within days, the agency's attention turned to a second candidate from Moderna, which received its own authorization on Dec. 18. The speed of the effort drew scrutiny as well as celebration, with regulators and public health officials stressing that the review had not skipped its safety steps. For a country that had spent months waiting for any sign of an exit, the announcement was a quiet piece of paper with enormous consequences. Yet the authorization was only the beginning of a long campaign, since the hardest part, persuading hundreds of millions of people to roll up their sleeves, still lay ahead.  

On Dec. 8, 2020, a 90-year-old grandmother in Coventry rolled up her sleeve and became the first person in the world to receive a fully tested COVID-19 vaccine outside a clinical trial Britain called it V-Day, and its first patient was a retired jewelry shop assistant who was a week shy of her 91st birthday. The first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine given outside a trial went into the arm of Margaret Keenan at University Hospital in Coventry, England, on the morning of Dec. 8, 2020. The jab came less than a year after the virus had first been identified, and days after British regulators authorized the shot. The National Health Service had spent weeks preparing for the moment, and it arrived with cameras waiting. V-Day in Coventry   Keenan, a former jewelry shop assistant, was among the first patients in line as the NHS began its mass vaccination program at hospital hubs across the United Kingdom. Nurse May Parsons administered the injection, and the moment was broadcast around the world. Britain had become the first Western country to authorize a fully tested COVID-19 vaccine, and it moved quickly to put doses into patients, prioritizing older adults and care home residents, who were the most vulnerable to the disease. Keenan, who was just a week away from turning 91, was among the first to be called. After the shot, she described it as the best early birthday present she could have wished for, a line that was quoted in headlines around the world. For a pandemic that had kept families apart for most of a year, one small needle stick in a Midlands hospital carried more weight than its few seconds suggested. The second person vaccinated that day was William Shakespeare, an 81-year-old from Warwickshire, a coincidence of names that British newspapers could scarcely resist. Within hours, the story had shifted from a scientific milestone into something close to a national ritual, with hospitals sharing images of the first patients and health officials urging the public to keep following restrictions while the rollout began. The shots themselves required two doses and carefully controlled ultra-cold storage, a logistical challenge that had dominated planning for weeks. Yet the images that endured were not of freezers or spreadsheets. They were of an older woman in a hospital gown and a patterned T-shirt, smiling beneath a mask, at the start of the long task of ending a global emergency.  

Dec. 3, 2018: Japan's Hayabusa2 Probe Takes Its Place Beside the Asteroid Ryugu to Begin a Hunt for Buried Secrets of the Solar System After more than three years of travel, a small Japanese spacecraft arrived at a rubble-pile asteroid to ask where Earth's water and organic ingredients came from. On Dec. 3, 2018, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft was in position at the asteroid Ryugu, a dark, spinning object roughly half a mile wide that orbits the Sun far from any ordinary neighborhood. It had launched in December 2014. The goal was to touch the surface, collect material, and bring it home. The Rendezvous   Hayabusa2 was the successor to the original Hayabusa, which returned a tiny amount of dust from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010 after a famously troubled journey. This time JAXA aimed at a carbon-rich asteroid, a type thought to preserve material from the early solar system, including possible clues about water and organic compounds. The spacecraft had reached Ryugu's vicinity in June 2018, using ion engines to match the asteroid's path and to hover at a distance of about twelve miles. In the months that followed, its cameras revealed a surface far rockier than scientists had expected, strewn with boulders and lacking the smooth, sandy patches mission planners had hoped might make a safe landing zone. Controllers would have to rethink their choices. The mission team had picked a target the shape of a spinning top, then found it covered in obstacles. The work of the following year went on to include small hopping rovers released onto the surface, a copper impactor that blasted an artificial crater, and two touchdowns to gather samples, including material from beneath the surface. Hayabusa2 left Ryugu in November 2019 and in December 2020 dropped a capsule over the Australian outback. The capsule held about 5.4 grams of dark grains, far more than the mission's target of 0.1 gram. Analysis later found organic molecules and amino acids in the samples. A probe built to fetch a pinch of dust returned with a heavy payload, from a rock that had spent billions of years drifting through the dark.  

Dec. 2, 2020: The United Kingdom Becomes the First Western Nation to Authorize a COVID-19 Vaccine With a regulatory green light for the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, Britain turned a year of lockdowns and loss toward a new kind of waiting: the wait for a needle. On Dec. 2, 2020, the UK's medicines regulator, the MHRA, granted temporary authorization to the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. It was the first time a Western country had approved a fully tested COVID-19 vaccine for public use, and it came barely eleven months after the virus first appeared in the news. The Green Light   The decision followed a rolling review of data from the companies' large Phase 3 trial, which had reported roughly 95 percent efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19. The regulator's approval allowed the shot to be supplied under temporary authorization, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the news on social media, calling it incredible. The vaccine was built on messenger RNA, a technology that had never before been used in an approved vaccine for the public. Researchers had spent years refining it in relative obscurity, and now it had gone from laboratory promise to government approval in a stretch of months that vaccine specialists once would have considered impossible. The approval also set off an unusual bit of international jostling. Other countries, whose regulators were still deep in their own reviews, now had to explain why a rival had reached the finish line first. For a pandemic that had made borders, schedules and ordinary life feel unmovable, the speed of the paperwork was, in its own way, a small shock. The first people in Britain to be vaccinated would not have to wait long. On Dec. 8, Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old woman in Coventry, became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech shot outside a clinical trial, in a hospital that had been turned into one of the country's first vaccination hubs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration followed with its own emergency use authorization on Dec. 11, and other nations soon joined in. The approval did not end the pandemic; cases and deaths kept climbing through the winter, and supplies were limited at first. But it changed the shape of the story. After months in which the most hopeful news was a downward curve on a chart, the headline now involved something people could actually roll up a sleeve for. The most anticipated science of the year arrived not with fanfare, but with a regulatory notice.  

On Nov. 28, 2018, a Chinese scientist walked onto a Hong Kong stage to defend the birth of the world's first gene-edited babies He Jiankui's public account of the CRISPR twins drew gasps, condemnation and a reckoning over who gets to rewrite the human genome. Scientific revolutions usually arrive in peer-reviewed journals. This one arrived in the news first. By Nov. 28, 2018, reports had already claimed that a researcher in Shenzhen had edited the DNA of human embryos and that two girls had been born from them. That afternoon, the man behind the claim had to explain himself to a roomful of his peers. The Hong Kong Stage   The venue was the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong, where He Jiankui, then an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, was scheduled to speak. He told the audience that he had used the CRISPR tool to alter a gene called CCR5 in embryos, with the aim of making children resistant to HIV infection. He said the work had produced twin girls, known publicly by the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana, and that a second pregnancy might also be underway. The claim had not been published or independently verified. His university said he had been on unpaid leave since February 2018 and that it had not known about the project. Many scientists in the room had spent years debating whether such an experiment should ever be attempted. They were now hearing that someone had already done it, and that the news had broken before any journal had a chance to weigh in. The reaction was swift. The summit's organizing committee said the next day that the work was irresponsible and failed to conform to international norms, and criticized the lack of transparency around it. Researchers pointed out that the embryos were healthy and that proven ways to protect children from HIV already existed. Chinese authorities opened an investigation, and in December 2019 a court in Shenzhen sentenced He to three years in prison and fined him three million yuan. The technology he used had been celebrated for its precision, but the episode showed that the harder problem was never the cutting. It was deciding, in advance and in public, who gets to hold the scissors.  

On Nov. 26, 2011, NASA Launched a Car-Sized Rover Called Curiosity Toward Mars on a Mission Meant to Last Two Years A one-ton robot left Florida on an Atlas V rocket with a simple question: could Mars ever have supported life? The morning after Thanksgiving weekend began, an Atlas V rocket stood on Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. On Nov. 26, 2011, it lifted off carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, a spacecraft built around a rover the size of a small car. The rover had been named Curiosity by a sixth-grade student, Clara Ma, in a national student contest. Its destination was 354 million miles away. The Long Cruise   The Atlas V launched at 10:02 a.m. Eastern time and sent the spacecraft on a roughly eight-month cruise to Mars. Curiosity was far larger than the rovers that came before it. It weighed about 900 kilograms, or nearly a ton, and carried ten science instruments, including a laser that could vaporize rock from a distance and a chemistry lab built to analyze soil and powdered stone. NASA put the mission's cost at about $2.5 billion. Its goal was less to find life than to find out whether Mars ever offered the conditions for it. The rover was bound for Gale Crater, where a mountain of layered rock rose from the crater floor like a geological history book. Engineers had picked it partly because the layers promised a record of how the planet changed over time. Getting there, however, required a landing method nobody had tried: the rover would be lowered to the surface on cables from a hovering rocket-powered platform. The launch was the easy part, and everyone involved knew it. The gamble paid off on Aug. 6, 2012, UTC, when Curiosity touched down inside Gale Crater after the so-called seven minutes of terror, the descent that had to be completed without any help from Earth. Within months, it found evidence of an ancient streambed, and later analysis of mudstone showed that the crater once held a lake with chemistry that could have supported microbial life. The prime mission was set at one Martian year, about 687 Earth days. Curiosity passed that mark long ago and was still climbing Mount Sharp more than a decade later, working through terrain no engineer had seen when the rocket left the pad. A rover that left Earth to answer one question has spent years producing new ones, which is how a two-year plan turned into a career.  

On Nov. 21, 2006, Seven Governments Gathered in Paris and Signed an Agreement to Build a Miniature Sun The ITER pact joined rivals and allies in one of the most ambitious science projects ever attempted: a machine meant to prove fusion power can work. Treaty signings are usually about borders, trade or weapons. On Nov. 21, 2006, in the Élysée Palace in Paris, the signatures went onto something stranger: a joint agreement to build an experimental reactor meant to mimic the process that powers the Sun. The European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, China, India and South Korea put their names to the ITER agreement, committing to a shared machine that none of them wanted to build alone. A Star in France   The idea behind ITER is simple to state and brutally hard to achieve. Fusion joins light atomic nuclei and releases energy, but only when fuel is heated to extreme temperatures and held in place long enough for the reaction to sustain itself. ITER's design, a doughnut-shaped tokamak that uses powerful magnets to confine superheated plasma, aims to produce roughly ten times the thermal power it takes to heat the fuel. The goal was never to put electricity on the grid. It was to demonstrate that the physics scales up. The site had been settled the year before: Cadarache, in southern France, won out over a rival bid from Japan after a long diplomatic contest. The 2006 signing turned that compromise into a legal framework, with each partner agreeing to contribute components and funding. The partners had spent years haggling over who would host the machine, and now they had to agree on who would pay for it. The agreement created a new international organization to oversee construction, and its design relied on an unusual arrangement: most contributions would arrive as finished hardware rather than cash, with parts built in factories across several continents and shipped to France. That structure kept every government invested in the outcome, but it also made coordination a constant challenge. Schedules slipped and cost estimates grew in the years that followed, and the first-plasma date announced around the time of the signing was later pushed back repeatedly. Still, the partners kept building. A project conceived partly as a Cold War-era gesture of scientific cooperation outlasted the political tensions that have strained relations among its members since. The machine meant to hold a star has proven slower to assemble than the diplomacy that launched it, and in some ways more stubborn.  

On Nov. 18, 2013, NASA's MAVEN Spacecraft Rocketed Toward Mars to Solve the Mystery of the Vanishing Atmosphere A single Atlas V launch from Florida set out to answer how a planet that once may have had rivers and lakes ended up cold, dry and nearly airless. On the afternoon of Nov. 18, 2013, an Atlas V rocket climbed off the pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida carrying a spacecraft with an unusual assignment. Most Mars missions had gone to look at the ground. MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, was built to look up, at the thin, tattered air that is all that remains of whatever Mars once had. The Missing Sky   Orbiters and rovers had already turned up channels, minerals and ancient lakebeds that pointed to a wetter, warmer Mars in the distant past. Water that flows on the surface needs a thicker atmosphere than the one the planet has now, so the obvious question was where that atmosphere went. MAVEN was NASA's attempt to measure the answer rather than guess at it. The spacecraft lifted off at 1:28 p.m. Eastern time aboard an Atlas V 401, on the first day of its launch period. Its plan was to settle into a looping orbit around Mars and sample the planet's upper atmosphere directly, while tracking the solar wind and ultraviolet light that strip gas away into space. Its instruments were designed to watch that process in action instead of inferring it from rocks. It was a small, focused mission built around a single big question, and its mission team knew that the answer might reveal as much about Earth's own long-term fate as about its neighbor's. It would be a ten-month trip before anyone could begin to find out. The trip ended on Sept. 21, 2014, when MAVEN fired its engines and slipped into orbit around Mars. It arrived just three days before India's Mars Orbiter Mission, which had left Earth two weeks before MAVEN, on Nov. 5, 2013. The two missions had set out in the same narrow launch window and finished the journey nearly together. Once MAVEN began its science work, it confirmed that the solar wind was a major force in eroding the Martian atmosphere, and NASA reported in 2015 that the loss was far greater during solar storms. The spacecraft that was built to look at what Mars had lost became, in effect, a witness to the loss still happening. Mars is not simply a planet that once had air. It is a planet whose air is, even now, still leaving.  

■  The Pop Edition November 18: Steamboat Willie Debuts, Breaking Dawn Opens A cartoon mouse whistled his way into sound-film history in 1928, Twilight split its finale in two in 2011, and Owen Wilson turns 58. Here is the full accounting of November 18. Mickey Mouse at the wheel in Steamboat Willie, the 1928 cartoon that premiered in New York. November 18 is a day with two very different kinds of staying power. In 1928, a short cartoon with a whistling mouse opened on Broadway and set the template for an entire studio. In 2011, a vampire romance began the first half of its last chapter. Add a Wes Anderson regular, a Metallica guitarist and a few film openings that still get rewatched, and this date has plenty to offer. THE MOMENT: Steamboat Willie   The mask in this story is really a mouse. On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie premiered at the Colony Theatre in New York, and it was not the first Mickey Mouse cartoon Walt Disney had made. Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho were finished earlier, but they were silent, and neither found a distributor. Willie was the one that audiences saw first, and the reason was sound. Disney had watched The Jazz Singer change the business and decided his mouse needed a soundtrack that matched the action. The short was synchronized to music and effects using Pat Powers’ Cinephone system. Pots, pans and a goat’s tail all became instruments, and the gags were timed to the beat. Disney himself supplied the few squeaks and whistles Mickey makes. New York critics noticed, and Disney had a character to build a studio around. Mickey later got his own voice, and the November 18 premiere is now treated as his birthday. The original short entered the US public domain on January 1, 2024, 95 years after it opened, which gave this old cartoon a second round of attention.   Born On This Day Owen Wilson BORN 1968 · TURNS 58 Wilson began as a screenwriter, co-writing Bottle Rocket with Wes Anderson and later earning an Oscar nomination for co-writing The Royal Tenenbaums. He became a comedy lead in Zoolander and Wedding Crashers, voiced Lightning McQueen in the Cars films, and played Mobius in the Marvel series Loki. Kirk Hammett BORN 1962 · TURNS 64 Hammett played in Exodus before joining Metallica in 1983, replacing Dave Mustaine. His lead work shaped albums from Ride the Lightning to the Black Album, and he went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the band in 2009. Chloë Sevigny BORN 1974 · TURNS 52 Sevigny went from downtown New York fashion fixture to film debut in Kids in 1995. She earned an Oscar nomination for Boys Don’t Cry and later won a Golden Globe for the HBO drama Big Love. Delroy Lindo BORN 1952 · TURNS 74 Lindo built a long stage and screen career with Spike Lee, appearing in Malcolm X and Clockers and later leading Da 5 Bloods. He has stayed busy, with a role in the 2025 film Sinners.   OPENING WEEKEND: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 The fourth Twilight film opened in US theaters on Friday, November 18, 2011, and it was the first of two movies built from a single book. Bill Condon, who had won an Oscar for writing Gods and Monsters, directed both halves, and the two parts were shot back to back rather than separately. Splitting the final novel was a strategy the Harry Potter series had already used with Deathly Hallows, which came out the same month. Fans of Breaking Dawn got the wedding, the honeymoon and a dangerous pregnancy in Part 1, with the finale held for the following year. It opened to roughly $138 million in the US and Canada, and reviews were harsher than the grosses. Fifteen years on, the series has had a second life online and in streaming, and this installment is remembered for its wedding and some spirited fan debate.   Meanwhile… 1928On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie premiered at New York’s Colony Theatre, and Mickey Mouse’s birthday has been counted from that date ever since. 1963Bell System began commercial service of push-button Touch-Tone telephones on November 18, 1963, ending the rotary dial’s monopoly over how people called. 1985Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes debuted in newspapers on November 18, 1985, and ran for ten years. 2005Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opened in the US on November 18, 2005, the first film in the series rated PG-13. 2005The Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line also opened on November 18, 2005, with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon doing their own singing. 2016Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opened in the US on November 18, 2016, ten years ago, launching a new series set in the Harry Potter world. From a mouse at a ship’s wheel to a vampire wedding, November 18 has a way of turning small bets into long franchises. Tomorrow brings another date and another stack of premieres, birthdays and oddities worth a second look. Come back then, and bring a friend who loves this stuff.

November 18: Courage, Creativity, and Catastrophe When courage inspires greatness and belief reveals its double edge November 18 captures the full spectrum of the human story—bravery in the face of tyranny, creativity that reshaped imagination, and tragedy born of blind devotion. From the legendary shot of William Tell to the joyful debut of Mickey Mouse and the haunting lessons of Jonestown, this day reminds us that courage and belief can inspire greatness—or lead to ruin. The Legend of William Tell According to legend, on November 18, 1307, Swiss hero William Tell performed one of history's most daring feats—shooting an apple off his son's head with a crossbow. The story takes place in Altdorf, where Tell defied the cruel Austrian bailiff Albrecht Gessler, who demanded submission to imperial rule. Refusing to bow, Tell was forced into a test of loyalty so cruel it bordered on execution. With steady hands and unshakable courage, he loosed his arrow—and split the apple clean in two, sparing his son's life. Though its historical accuracy remains debated, the tale of William Tell endures as a symbol of defiance and national pride. It became a rallying cry for Swiss independence and inspired generations to resist oppression. Beyond myth, the story reflects a universal truth: that one act of courage, even in the face of fear, can echo far beyond its moment in time.   William Tell's legendary shot becomes a timeless symbol of courage and defiance against tyranny. The Mouse That Changed the World More than six centuries later, on November 18, 1928, another arrow of destiny was released—not from a bow, but from the imagination of Walt Disney. That day, the animated short Steamboat Willie premiered in New York City, introducing audiences to a plucky new character named Mickey Mouse. With synchronized sound, expressive animation, and mischievous charm, Mickey became an instant sensation and changed the course of entertainment history. Mickey's debut was more than a cartoon; it was the birth of an empire. The cheerful mouse became a global icon, embodying optimism and creativity during some of America's darkest times, including the Great Depression. Steamboat Willie not only launched Disney's career but also helped usher in the golden age of animation. Nearly a century later, Mickey remains a timeless symbol of imagination's power to bring joy to the world. Mickey Mouse makes his debut, launching an entertainment empire and capturing hearts worldwide. ❦ The Tragedy of Jonestown On November 18, 1978, a far darker chapter was written deep in the Guyanese jungle. What began as a utopian vision ended in horror when over 900 members of the People's Temple died in what became known as the Jonestown Massacre. Led by the charismatic but increasingly paranoid Jim Jones, the group had fled the United States to escape scrutiny, seeking refuge in a commune meant to embody equality and peace. But beneath its surface, Jonestown became a prison of control, fear, and manipulation. When U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan arrived to investigate reports of abuse, violence erupted. Soon after, Jones ordered his followers to drink poison-laced punch, resulting in one of the largest mass deaths in modern history. The tragedy of Jonestown exposed the terrifying consequences of blind faith and unchecked authority. Its echoes continue to serve as a chilling reminder of how easily devotion can turn to destruction when reason is silenced.   The tragic aftermath of Jonestown stands as a stark warning about blind devotion and unchecked power.

On Nov. 17, 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger Was Sworn In as Governor of California, Completing a Recall Election Unlike Any the State Had Seen Six weeks after voters threw out Gray Davis, the action star took the oath in Sacramento and began the job he had campaigned for. On Nov. 17, 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger stood on the steps of the California State Capitol and took the oath of office as the state's 38th governor. It was the finish of one of the strangest campaigns in American political history, a sprint that went from a late-night talk show announcement to the governor's office in barely three months. The Recall Governor   The path to that day began on Oct. 7, 2003, when California voters recalled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, who had won re-election less than a year earlier. Davis became only the second governor in American history to be removed by recall, after North Dakota's Lynn Frazier in 1921. The ballot had two parts: whether to remove Davis, and who should replace him. The replacement field was enormous, packed with politicians, entertainers and private citizens. Schwarzenegger had announced his candidacy on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in August, choosing a late-night couch over a press conference. When the votes were counted, a majority had voted to recall Davis, and Schwarzenegger won the replacement contest with a plurality of the vote. The man best known for playing a machine in The Terminator had beaten the entire political establishment of the nation's largest state, and he had done it by running against the idea of the establishment itself. The swearing-in took place outdoors in Sacramento, where Schwarzenegger took the oath from California Chief Justice Ronald George and became governor of a state grappling with a serious budget crisis. He moved quickly on his signature campaign promise, signing an executive order to roll back an increase in the state's vehicle license fee. It was a fitting first act for a candidate who had promised to clean house. His time in office would be defined by deals with the same legislators he had once vowed to overpower, and by the compromises that governing demands. A man who built a career on playing someone who needed no negotiation spent seven years learning how much of California politics runs on exactly that.  

■  The Pop Edition November 17: Casino Royale Opens, PS3 Launches Daniel Craig's first Bond film and Sony's PlayStation 3 both reached Americans 20 years ago today. Plus Martin Scorsese turns 84, and the Heidi Game, the computer mouse and more. Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale, which opened in US theaters in 2006. November 17, 2006 was a big Friday for people who spend their free time in front of screens. A rebooted James Bond walked into American theaters, and a few miles of electronics-store sidewalk filled up with people waiting for a $499 game console. Twenty years later, both still mark a turning point. Today also brings a director's birthday, a famous TV cutaway, and the patent for a gadget that sits under your hand. OPENING WEEKEND: Casino Royale Casino Royale opened in US theaters on Friday, November 17, 2006, 20 years ago today. It was Daniel Craig's first turn as James Bond, and the story it adapted was Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, published in 1953.The film reset the series to the start of Bond's career. It had him earn his 00 status in a black-and-white pre-title sequence, then chase a bomb-maker across a Madagascar construction site. Eva Green played Vesper Lynd, and Mads Mikkelsen played Le Chiffre, a villain who weeps blood and plays poker for a living. Chris Cornell, the Soundgarden singer, performed the theme, “You Know My Name.”The film had opened in the UK three days earlier, on November 14. Before release, Craig's casting had drawn public grumbling, including a campaign against the blond actor taking the role. Reviews were strong, and the film is often named among the best of the series. It set the tone for the Craig era: a Bond who bled, got beaten up, and fell in love.  Born On This DayMartin ScorseseBORN 1942 · TURNS 84The New York native broke out with Mean Streets in 1973 and made Taxi Driver in 1976. He has since made Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed and Killers of the Flower Moon. The Departed won him his Best Director Oscar in 2007. He is also a tireless film preservationist.Danny DeVitoBORN 1944 · TURNS 82He broke through as Louie De Palma on Taxi, then moved to film with Romancing the Stone and Twins. He directed Throw Momma from the Train and War of the Roses, and has played Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia since 2005.Lorne MichaelsBORN 1944 · TURNS 82The Toronto-born producer created Saturday Night Live in 1975 and has run it for most of its history. He also produced Wayne's World and Mean Girls, and an unusual number of comedy careers owe their start to his casting.RuPaulBORN 1960 · TURNS 66RuPaul Charles had a 1993 hit with “Supermodel (You Better Work)”. In 2009 he launched RuPaul's Drag Race, which grew into a multi-Emmy-winning franchise and brought drag to mainstream television.Rachel McAdamsBORN 1978 · TURNS 48The Ontario-born actor had a breakout 2004 with Mean Girls and The Notebook. She later earned an Oscar nomination for Spotlight and starred in Wedding Crashers, Game Night and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.   PRESS START: PlayStation 3Sony's PlayStation 3 launched in North America on November 17, 2006, 20 years ago today. It arrived in two models, a 20GB version at $499 and a 60GB version at $599. The price was the headline, and it came with a Blu-ray drive inside every unit.The console had reached Japan on November 11. The US launch drew long lines outside stores, and supply was tight. The PS3 was built around the Cell processor, a chip that developers found hard to program for. Nintendo's Wii, much cheaper and aimed at casual players, went on sale in the US two days later, on November 19.The PS3 had a rough start against the Xbox 360, which had launched a year earlier, but it recovered. The Blu-ray bet helped Sony's format beat HD DVD, and exclusives such as Uncharted and The Last of Us built a reputation that outlasted the launch-day sticker shock.   Meanwhile…1968On November 17, 1968, NBC cut away from the Jets-Raiders game at 7 p.m. ET to start the movie Heidi, with the Jets leading 32–29. Viewers missed the Raiders scoring two touchdowns in the last minute to win 43–32. The game became known as the Heidi Game.1970Douglas Engelbart received the US patent for the computer mouse on November 17, 1970. He described it as an “X-Y position indicator,” and the prototype was a wooden shell with two wheels.2000Rugrats in Paris: The Movie opened in US theaters on November 17, 2000, sending the babies to France and introducing Kimi Finster.2006Happy Feet, George Miller's dancing-penguin musical voiced by Elijah Wood and Robin Williams, opened the same day as Casino Royale. It later won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.2017Justice League opened in US theaters on November 17, 2017. Zack Snyder left late in production after a family tragedy, and Joss Whedon completed the film.2023The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes opened on November 17, 2023, with Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird. A spy who bleeds, a console that cost as much as a decent laptop, and a game that vanished from TV in the final minute: November 17 has plenty of firsts and one famous interruption. Tomorrow brings another date and another stack of pop culture to dig through.

Nov. 16, 2020: Moderna Announces That Its mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Was 94.5% Effective in Its Phase 3 Trial A Monday-morning press release put a number on the hope that a new kind of vaccine could end the worst pandemic in a century. On Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, biotech company that had never brought a product to market announced results that would change the pandemic's trajectory. Moderna said an early look at its Phase 3 trial showed its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, was 94.5% effective at preventing symptomatic disease. The figure arrived as case counts climbed across the United States and Europe. The Interim Analysis   The trial, run with the National Institutes of Health, had enrolled about 30,000 volunteers across the United States. An independent data safety monitoring board conducted the first interim analysis once 95 participants had developed confirmed symptomatic COVID-19. Of those cases, 90 were in the placebo group and only five were in the group that received the vaccine. The board also counted 11 severe cases, and all 11 were in the placebo group. Moderna said the vaccine could be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures, 36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit, for 30 days, and at minus 4 degrees for six months, a practical edge for distribution. The company's design work had begun in January 2020, shortly after the virus's genetic sequence was published. A technology long considered promising but unproven had gone from a computer file to a late-stage trial in under a year, which is a pace that vaccine development had never come close to matching. The announcement came one week after Pfizer and BioNTech had reported that their own mRNA vaccine was more than 90% effective, so Moderna's result served as confirmation as much as surprise. Two different companies, using the same underlying idea, had arrived at results far above the 50% efficacy that regulators had set as a minimum bar. Moderna cautioned that the data were preliminary and still needed review by regulators. That review came quickly. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to the vaccine on Dec. 18, 2020. For a company that had spent a decade as a scientific curiosity, a single Monday press release had been enough to turn years of skepticism about messenger RNA into one of the most closely watched medical results of the century.