Today in History.....December 9

On this day in …

* 1835, the Texan Army captures San Antonio

* 1865, the New York Stock Exchange threw open the doors on its new home, located at 10-12 Broad Street in lower Manhattan

* 1926, Benny Goodman records his first solo, 16 bars of a song called "He's the Last Word."

* 1940, British troops opened their first major offensive in North Africa during World War II.

* 1981, Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner is found dead on the street with Mumia Abu-Jamal lying severely wounded nearby. In 1982, Abu-Jamal was tried for and convicted of Faulkner's murder, but in recent years he was been made a "cause." He is still alive.

* 1984, the five-day-old hijacking of a Kuwaiti jetliner by practitioners of that "religion of peace" that claimed the lives of two Americans ended as Iranian security men seized control of the plane, which was parked at Tehran airport

* 1990, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa won Poland's presidential runoff by a landslide

* 1992, Britain's Prince Charles and Princess Diana announced their separation. (The couple's divorce became final Aug. 28, 1996.)

* 1993, the Air Force destroyed the first of 500 Minuteman II missile silos marked for elimination under an arms control treaty

* 1994, representatives of the Irish Republican Army and the British government opened peace talks in Northern Ireland. ALSO: President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders after learning she'd told a conference that masturbation should be discussed in school as a part of human sexuality

* 1998, Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse, was honored at a daylong public symposium at Stanford University.

* 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a temporary halt in the Florida vote count on which Al Gore pinned his best hopes of winning the White House. ALSO: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced he would resign and call a special election