Homer Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons. Homer is the boorish father of the Simpson family and as the family's provider, he works at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. With his wife, Marge, he has three children: Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. Homer embodies several American working class stereotypes: he is crude, overweight, incompetent, clumsy, lazy and ignorant; however, he is also fiercely devoted to his family. Homer was created and designed by cartoonist Matt Groening. He is voiced by Dan Castellaneta and first appeared on television, along with the rest of his family, in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987. After appearing on The Tracey Ullman Show for three years, the Simpson family got their own series on Fox, which debuted December 17, 1989. Homer is one of the most influential fictional characters on television and has inspired an entire line of merchandise. His catchphrase, the annoyed grunt "d'oh!", has been included in several dictionaries. Castellaneta has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance and a special achievement Annie Award for voicing Homer. (more...)

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• Former Acting Prime Minister of Russia Yegor Gaidar, one of the architects of post-Soviet reform, dies at the age of 53.
• The Boeing 787 Dreamliner (artist's impression pictured), a wide-body passenger airliner, takes its maiden flight.
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December 17: National Day in Bhutan (1907)

• 1819 – The Republic of Gran Colombia in South America was established, with Simón Bolívar as its first president.
• 1862 – American Civil War: Union General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky.
• 1903 – In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, Orville and Wilbur Wright aboard the Wright Flyer (pictured) conducted the first successful flight of a powered fixed-wing aircraft.
• 1918 – Protesting government policies concerning political representation, unemployment and taxation, about 1,000 demonstrators marched on Government House in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, where they burnt an effigy of the Administrator of the Northern Territory John Gilruth and demanded his resignation.
• 1944 – Nazi German troops under Joachim Peiper killed unarmed prisoners of war, captured during the Battle of the Bulge, with machine guns near Malmedy, Belgium.

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A bust of the German composer and pianist Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), made from his death mask. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most acclaimed and influential composers of all time. Born in Bonn, of the Electorate of Cologne and a part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in present-day Germany, he moved to Vienna in his early twenties and settled there, studying with Joseph Haydn and quickly gaining a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. His hearing began to deteriorate in the late 1790s, yet he continued to compose, conduct, and perform, even after becoming completely deaf. Photo: W. J. Mayer; Restoration: Lise Broer Recently featured: Coriolanus – Grand Prismatic Spring – Mt. Redoubt eruption Archive – More featured pictures...