Disputed U.S. presidential election
On this day in 2000, the U.S. presidential election ended in a statistical tie between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, only to be settled on December 12 by the U.S. Supreme Court after a bitter legal dispute. 2000.
American politician Hillary Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first first lady to win elective office. 2000.
NASA launched Mars Global Surveyor, a robotic spacecraft designed to carry out a long-term study of the planet; contact with the spacecraft was lost in 2006. 1996.
American professional basketball player Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive and was immediately retiring from the sport; he later played part of the 1995–96 season. 1991.
Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Thomas E. Dewey and was elected to an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States. 1944.
The October Revolution (named after the dates of this event in the Julian calendar), the last phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, ended as the Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia, inaugurating the Soviet regime. 1917.
Marie Curie (born November 7, 1867, Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire—died July 4, 1934, near Sallanches, France) was a Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields.
