Beli Orao was a royal yacht built for the Yugoslav Royal Navy in 1938–1939. She was captured in April 1941 by the Italians during the World War II invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers. Re-armed, she saw service as a gunboat in the Italian Royal Navy, briefly as Alba then Zagabria, undertaking harbour protection and coastal escort duties. She was then used to train anti-submarine warfare specialists. After the Italian armistice with the Allies in September 1943, she was handed back to the Yugoslav navy-in-exile on 7 December. Refitted, and under her original name, she became a tender for a flotilla of motor gunboats. In this role she operated out of Malta, off the western coast of Italy, and later off the Yugoslav coast. After the war she remained in Yugoslav hands under the names Biokovo then Jadranka, serving as a naval yacht, as a presidential yacht and as a dispatch boat. In 1978, she was still in service, but was scrapped soon after. (Full article...)

Opal embedded in jasper

• ... that silicification can produce opal (example pictured)?
• ... that Desmond Young's biography of Erwin Rommel was criticised for portraying him as a "blue-eyed god who could do no wrong"?
• ... that the theme of the board game Parks is based on the national parks of the United States?
• ... that Sjafruddin Prawiranegara ordered Indonesians to physically cut their banknotes in half?
• ... that Bobby Hackett said that Jackie Gleason's main contribution to the recording of Music for Lovers Only was that "he brought the checks"?
• ... that critics complained about the manga Sex Ed 120% being given a "mature" rating by its English-language publisher?
• ... that film producer Konstantin Kalser, who won an Oscar for his 1956 short film Crashing the Water Barrier, later admitted that the film was an advertisement for an oil company?
• ... that Styx's name derives from its seeming to have "come from the underworld"?

Karl Nehammer

• Karl Nehammer (pictured) becomes the new Chancellor of Austria following the resignation of Alexander Schallenberg.
• On the Indonesian island of Java, Mount Semeru erupts, killing at least 34 people and injuring more than 50 others.
• The Indian agriculture acts are repealed after a year of protests by farmers.
• Xiomara Castro is elected as the first female President of Honduras.

December 7: Feast day of Saint Ambrose (Christianity); National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in the United States (1941)

Artist's impression of the Galileo spacecraft

• 574 – Suffering from mental illness, Eastern Roman emperor Justin II had his general Tiberius proclaimed Caesar, adopting him as his own son.
• 1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Prairie Grove ended a Confederate attempt to regain control of northwestern Arkansas.
• 1936 – Australian cricketer Jack Fingleton became the first player to score centuries in four consecutive Test innings.
• 1975 – The Indonesian military invaded East Timor under the pretext of anti-colonialism, beginning an occupation.
• 1995 – The Galileo spacecraft (illustration shown) arrived at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.