On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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As Monica Foster prepared her stuffed beef tenderloin on Friday and wrapped her remaining presents, she debated what would be the most suitable outfit to wear with her family around the dinner table this Christmas. The black T-shirt with large block letters reading ''Suspend Stern'' or the gold T-shirt with the message, ''Indiana Subs vs. Detroit Thugs Christmas Day 2004.''
Investigation finds that conductors on Long Island Railroad allow workers at Madison Square Garden free rides on trains in exchange for free entry into events at MSG; arrangement may have lasted since 1999; James Dermody, railroads president, takes immediate action to stop arrangement that he calls clear violation of rail pass policy; Madison Square Garden says it has not seen report, but that they had been first to bring issue to attention of LIRR; report does not find that any laws were broken; MSG sit atop LIRR terminal at Pennsylvania Station (M)
Real estate developer Zhang Yuchen copied 17th-century French chateau in suburban Beijing, hoping to attract China's new rich to rent its rooms and buy homes amid equestrian trails and golf course; 800 peasants who once grew wheat there have lost their land under new rules that allow elite to acquire trappings of America in age of robber barons; photos (M)
Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, Calif, plans to drastically scale back operations in mid-January, lay off its 14 workers and operate on freelance basis; Francis Ford Coppola's San Francisco-based American Zoetrope Productions will close by end of year; is expected to reopen under name ZAP Productions, focus on DVD production and be run by Kim Aubry; reasons for changes reportedly include advancing age of Zaentz, 84, Coppola's decision to stop directing Hollywood movies and shifting trends in industry, in which editing and even sound design can be accomplished on laptop computers; photo (M)
Traditional last-minute shoppers flood malls across country on Christmas Eve; photos (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of December 22, 2004, covering December 25, 2004.
Ludacris
U2
Eminem
Lindsay Lohan
Various Artists
2004Gennadi Strekalov, Russian engineer and astronaut (born 1940)[†]
Gennady Mikhailovich Strekalov was an engineer, cosmonaut, and administrator at Russian aerospace firm RSC Energia. He flew into space five times and lived aboard the Salyut 6, Salyut 7, and Mir space stations, spending over 268 days in space. The catastrophic explosion of a Soyuz rocket in 1983 led to him being one of only four people to use a launch escape system. He was decorated twice as Hero of the Soviet Union and received the Ashoka Chakra from India.
2004The Cassini orbiter releases Huygens probe which successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005.[†]
Cassini–Huygens, commonly called Cassini, was a space-research mission by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to send a space probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites. The Flagship-class robotic spacecraft comprised both NASA's Cassini space probe and ESA's Huygens lander, which landed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Cassini was the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit, where it stayed from 2004 to 2017. The two craft took their names from the astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens.
In 2004, the world population was approximately 6,503,377,772 people[†]