Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 28

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 * 484 – Alaric II succeeded his father Euric as King of the Visigoths.
 * 1065 – Westminster Abbey, built by Edward the Confessor as the first Romanesque church in England, was first consecrated.
 * 1612 – Galileo Galilei became the first person to observe the planet Neptune, although he mistakenly catalogued it as a fixed star.
 * 1767 – Taksin the Great was crowned king of the newly established Thonburi Kingdom at the new capital of Thonburi in present-day Thailand.
 * 1879 – The Tay Bridge, spanning the Firth of Tay in Scotland between Dundee and Wormit, collapsed during a violent storm while a train was passing over it, killing all on board.
 * 1907 – The last confirmed sighting of the now-extinct huia occurred in the Tararua Range on New Zealand's North Island.
 * 1908 – An earthquake registering 7.1 Mw struck near Messina, which, along with the subsequent tsunami, killed at least 75,000 people in southern Italy.
 * 1967 – American businesswoman Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
 * 1989 – In one of Australia's worst natural disasters, an earthquake measuring 5.6 ML struck Newcastle, New South Wales, killing 13 people and injuring more than 160 others, and causing an estimated A$4 billion in damages.
 * 2006 – Somali Civil War: Troops of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government and their Ethiopian allies captured Mogadishu unopposed.
 * 2009 – A suicide bomber attacked a Shia procession commemorating the day of Ashura in Karachi, Pakistan, causing 43 deaths.
 * 2009 – Tibetan dissident filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen was imprisoned for subversion by Chinese authorities after a secret trial.
 * 2011 – Kurdish–Turkish conflict: Acting on information that Kurdish militants were crossing the border from Iraqi territory, two Turkish F-16 jets fired at a group of villagers, killing 34 people.
 * 2014 – The passenger ferry MS Norman Atlantic (pictured) caught fire in the Adriatic Sea.


 * Born/died: | Wang Zongbi |d|925| Antoine Furetière |b|1619| William Carstares |d|1715| Eliza Lucas |b|1722| Arthur Hunter Palmer |b|1819| Ratan Tata |b|1937| Maurice Ravel |d|1937| Barbara Judge |b|1946| Sharon Dyall |b|1962 | Susan Sontag |d|2004