On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Damon Darlin Your Money column on slow change in attitude of call center representatives toward customers seeking to rectify problems; companies are now embracing idea that happy customers tend to buy more products or recommend company's product or service to others; call center managers and supervisors offer advice on how customers can get what they want; photos (M)
Dismissal of marketing team head Julie Roehm, for allegedly violating company policy by accepting gifts from potential vendors and maintaining personal relationship with subordinate, exposes deeper tensions within Wal-Mart empire; company, which year ago introduced ads that emphasized style and played down price as it tried to appeal to more affluent Americans, has suddenly reversed itself and has begun trumpeting price-slashing for 2006 holiday season (M)
Elk, deer and other big-game animals are being killed in wave of poaching that has alarmed state and federal wildlife officials in Nevada and several other Western states; authorities say they are seeing more organized rings of poachers and unlicensed guides chasing biggest elk and mule deer, with largest antler array, sometimes trading them on Internet auction sites or submitting pictures to hunting magazines that prominently feature big kills; National Park Service says that poaching contributed to decline of 29 species of wildlife in 390 parks and other sites it oversees; map; photos (M)
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a beacon of neoconservative thought, helped chart foreign policy from 1981 to 1985.
Article on efforts by Microsoft to compete with Google in Internet business; Microsoft's online properties have lost users in US over last year and billions of dollars it has spent to build its own search engine have yet to pay off; Steve Berkowitz, who heads Microsoft's online services unit, comments on changes that have been made and those that are planned; photos; graphs (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of December 6, 2006, covering December 9, 2006.
Jay-Z
Daughtry
Various Artists
The Beatles
Snoop Dogg
2006Georgia Gibbs, American singer (born 1919)[†]
Georgia Gibbs was an American popular singer and vocal entertainer rooted in jazz. Already singing publicly in her early teens, Gibbs achieved acclaim and notoriety in the mid-1950s copying songs originating with the black rhythm and blues community and later became a featured vocalist for many radio and television variety and comedy programs. Her key attribute was tremendous versatility and an uncommon stylistic range from melancholy ballad to uptempo swinging jazz and rock and roll.
2006Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-116 carrying the P5 truss segment of the International Space Station.[†]
The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. Its official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft where it was the only item funded for development, as a proposed nuclear shuttle in the plan was cancelled in 1972. It flew 135 missions and carried 355 astronauts from 16 countries, many on multiple trips.
In 2006, the world population was approximately 6,671,452,015 people[†]