Colo died January 2017 at age 60 in the zoo where she was so
famously born. (Columbus Zoo and Aquarium)

On December 22, 1956, a baby gorilla named Colo entered the world at the
Columbus Zoo in Ohio, becoming the first-ever gorilla born in captivity. She
Weighed in at approximately 4 pounds, Colo, a western lowland gorilla
whose name was a combination of Columbus and Ohio, was the daughter
of Millie and Mac, two gorillas captured in French Cameroon, Africa, who
were brought to the Columbus Zoo in 1951. Before Colo’s birth, gorillas
found at zoos were caught in the wild, often by brutal means. In order to
capture a gorilla when it was young and therefore still small enough to
handle, hunters frequently had to kill the gorilla’s parents and other family members.

Colo, who generated enormous public interest, went on to become a mother, grandmother, and in 1996, a great-grandmother to Timu, the first surviving
infant gorilla conceived by artificial insemination. Timu gave birth to her first
baby in 2003.

DALLAS (AP) — Cartoonist Jim Davis (above) is offering up more than 11,000 “Garfield” comic strips hand-drawn on paper in an auction that will stretch
into the coming years, with at least a couple of strips featuring the always-
hungry orange cat with a sardonic sense of humor available weekly.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions began offering up the strips in August. The
auction house is selling two daily strips each week, along with longer
Sunday strips being offered during the large-scale auctions throughout
the year.

The strips span from the launch of “Garfield” in 1978 to 2011, when Davis
began drawing the strip digitally. He says he still draws it by hand but now
it’s with a stylus on a tablet instead of on paper with a pencil, pen and brush.

June, 1978

Winter solstice 2019 in the Northern Hemisphere will be today (Sat) 
at 8:19 P.M. (Pacific Time).

The winter solstice, also known as midwinter, occurs when one of the Earth’s
poles has its maximum tilt away from the Sun. It happens twice yearly, once
in each hemisphere (Northern and Southern). For that hemisphere, the winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight and longest night of
the year, when the Sun is at its lowest daily maximum elevation in the sky.

At the pole, there is continuous darkness or twilight around the winter
solstice. Its opposite is the summer solstice.   

Illumination of Earth by the Sun on the day of the December solstice.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to exploded in midair
over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members
aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden
inside an audio cassette player detonated in the cargo area when the plane
was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of
Britain’s largest criminal investigation, was believed to be an attack against
the United States. One hundred eighty nine of the victims were American.

Islamic terrorists were accused of planting the bomb on the plane while it
was at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.

Flight 103 impact crater at Lockerbie, Scotland.

    
Depiction of the moment the bomb was detonated.

(AP) – Robert Glenn "Junior" Johnson, a moonshine runner turned
NASCAR driver described as "The Last American Hero" by author
Tom Wolfe in a 1965 article for Esquire, died Friday.

NASCAR announced the death of Johnson, the winner of 50 races as
a driver and 132 as an owner. He was a member of the inaugural class
inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2010.

A native of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Johnson was named
one of NASCAR’s greatest drivers in 1998 after a 14-year career that
ended  in 1966 and included a win in the 1960 Daytona 500. He honed
his driving skills running moonshine through the North Carolina hills,
a crime for  which he received a federal conviction in 1956 and a full
presidential pardon in 1986 from President Ronald Reagan.