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of 240,000 that will need years to recover.
• Soon after the storm, Philippine Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla promised to restore power by Christmas Eve or resign, and indeed, electricity has returned to nearly all of the more than 300 towns that lost it. But relatively few people are able to use it. Officials say many storm-ravaged houses and shops will spend the holidays in the dark because their wiring systems are damaged.
• City Hall, a seaside hilltop complex surrounded by ruins, buzzes with typhoon relief work, with dozens of staffers and foreign aid workers busy on the phone or huddled in talks.
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Today in History
The Associated Press
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• Today is Tuesday, Dec. 24, the 358th day of 2013. There are seven days left in the year. This is Christmas Eve.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On Dec. 24, 1913, 73 people, most of them children, died in a crush of panic after someone falsely called out "Fire!" during a Christmas party for striking miners and their families at the Italian Hall in Calumet, Mich.
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• On this date:
• In 1524, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama - who had discovered a sea route around Africa to India - died in Cochin, India.
• In 1814, the War of 1812 officially ended as the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent.
• In 1851, fire devastated the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., destroying about 35,000 volumes.
• In 1863, English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of "Vanity Fair," died in London at age 52.
• In 1865, several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tenn., called the Ku Klux Klan.
• In 1871, Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Aida" had its world premiere in Cairo, Egypt.
• In 1906, Canadian physicist Reginald A. Fessenden became the first person to transmit the human voice (his own) as well as music over radio, from Brant Rock, Mass.
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