this is the week that was
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Your support makes all the difference.18 December:
1970: Divorce becomes legal in Italy.
1983: Gerald Ford becomes the first US President to appear in a soap opera when he makes a guest appearance in Dynasty.
19 December:
1863: Frederick Walton of London patents linoleum.
1980: Alexei Kosygin dies, aged 77, on the 74th birthday of his former colleague, Leonid Brezhnev.
20 December:
1957: Elvis Presley receives his call-up papers.
21 December:
1846: The surgeon Robert Liston performs the first leg amputation at University College Hospital using ether as a general anaesthetic.
1880: The Isle of Man gives the vote to property-owning widows and spinsters.
1911: The Jules Bonnet gang in Paris escape after a bank raid in the first recorded use of a getaway car.
1935: Premiere of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
22 December:
1938: A coelacanth is caught off the coast of South Africa, refuting the idea that it had been extinct for 70 million years.
1943: The Government announces that there are only enough turkeys in Britain for one family in ten.
23 December:
1834: Joseph Hansom patents the "safety cab".
1888: Van Gogh cuts off his ear.
1987: Santa Claus, by arrangement with the Finnish Tourist Board, has an audience with the Pope.
24 December:
1974: The Beatles partnership is legally dissolved.
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