Today is Friday, Dec. 18, the 352nd day of 2009. There are 13 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Dec. 18, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was declared in effect by Secretary of State William H. Seward.

On this date:

In 1787, New Jersey became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

In 1892, Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Nutcracker" publicly premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson, widowed the year before, married Edith Bolling Galt at her Washington home.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered secret preparations for Nazi Germany to invade the Soviet Union. (Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941.)

In 1944, in a pair of rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans, but also said undeniably loyal Americans of Japanese ancestry could not continue to be detained.

In 1957, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first public, full-scale commercial nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States, went on line. (It was taken out of service in 1982.)

In 1958, the world's first communications satellite, SCORE, or Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment, nicknamed "Chatterbox," was launched by the United States aboard an Atlas rocket.

In 1969, Britain's House of Lords joined the House of Commons in making permanent a 1965 ban on the death penalty for cases of murder.

In 1972, the United States began heavy bombing of North Vietnamese targets during the Vietnam War. (The bombardment ended 11 days later.)

In 1980, former Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin died at age 76.

Ten years ago: In St. Martinville, La., the last of the federal immigration detainees who'd taken a jail warden and three others hostage for almost a week surrendered. After living atop an ancient redwood in Humboldt County, Calif., for two years, environmental activist Julia "Butterfly" Hill came down to earth, ending her anti-logging protest. French film director Robert Bresson died in Paris at age 98.

Five years ago: The former Iraqi general known as "Chemical Ali," Ali Hassan al-Majid, went before a judge in the first investigative hearings of former members of his regime. Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was hospitalized after suffering a stroke.