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Hurricane Dean was the strongest tropical cyclone of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the most intense Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Wilma of 2005, tying for seventh overall. Additionally, it made the third most intense Atlantic hurricane landfall. A Cape Verde-type hurricane that formed on August 13, 2007, Dean took a west-northwest path from the eastern Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lucia Channel and into the Caribbean Sea. It strengthened into a major hurricane, reaching Category 5 status on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale before passing just south of Jamaica on August 20. The storm made landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula on August 21 as a powerful Category 5 storm. It crossed the peninsula and emerged into the Bay of Campeche weakened, but still a hurricane. It strengthened briefly before making a second landfall in Veracruz near Tecolutla, Mexico, on August 22. Dean drifted to the northwest, weakening into a remnant low which dissipated uneventfully over the southwestern United States. The hurricane's intense winds, waves, rains and storm surge were responsible for at least 45 deaths across ten countries and caused estimated damages of US$1.5 billion. Through the affected regions, cleanup and repair took months to complete. Its long swath of damage earned its name retirement from the World Meteorological Organization's Atlantic hurricane naming lists. (more...)

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• Continental Airlines is ordered to pay Air France €1 million for the 2000 crash of Air France Flight 4590, the only fatal incident in Concorde history.
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December 9: Hanukkah ends at sunset (Judaism, 2010); Independence Day in Tanzania (1961); Army Day in Peru

• 1425 – Pope Martin V issued a papal bull establishing what later became the Catholic University of Leuven, the largest, oldest and most prominent university in Belgium.
• 1824 – Forces led by General Antonio José de Sucre (pictured) defeated a Royalist army in the Battle of Ayacucho, ending the Peruvian War of Independence.
• 1872 – P. B. S. Pinchback took office as Governor of Louisiana, the first African American governor of a U.S. state.
• 1946 – The Doctors' Trial, the first of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, began to prosecute doctors who were allegedly involved in Nazi human experimentation during World War II.
• 1979 – A World Health Organization commission of scientists certified the global eradication of smallpox, making it the only human infectious disease to date to have been completely eradicated from nature.

More anniversaries: December 8 – December 9 – December 10