TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Tuesday, Oct. 9, the 282nd day of 2018.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On Oct. 9, 1776, a group of Spanish missionaries settled in present-day San Francisco.
ON THIS DATE
In 1888, the public was first admitted to the Washington Monument.
In 1910, a coal dust explosion at the Starkville Mine in Colorado left 56 miners dead.
In 1914, the Belgian city of Antwerp fell to German forces during World War I.
In 1930, Laura Ingalls became the first woman to fly across the United States as she completed a ninestop journey from Roosevelt Field, N.Y., to Glendale, Calif.
In 1936, the first generator at Boulder (later Hoover) Dam began transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.
In 1958, Pope Pius XII died at age 82, ending a 19-year papacy. (He was succeeded by Pope John XXIII.)
In 1967, Marxist revolutionary guerrilla leader Che Guevara, 39, was summarily executed by the Bolivian army a day after his capture.
In 1985, the hijackers of the Achille Lauro (ah-KEE’leh LOW’-roh) cruise liner surrendered two days after seizing the vessel in the Mediterranean. (Passenger Leon Klinghoffer was killed by the hijackers during the standoff.)
In 1995, a sabotaged section of track caused an Amtrak train, the Sunset Limited, to derail in Arizona; one person was killed and about 80 were injured (the case remains unsolved).
In 2001, in the first daylight raids since the start of U.S.led attacks on Afghanistan, jets bombed the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Letters postmarked in Trenton, N.J., were sent to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy; the letters later tested positive for anthrax.
In 2006, North Korea faced a barrage of condemnation and calls for retaliation after it announced that it had set off a small atomic weapon underground; President Bush said, “The international community will respond.”
In 2009, President Barack Obama was named the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Ten years ago: Calm gave way to fear in financial markets, turning a relatively steady day into a rout that pushed the Dow Jones industrials below 9,000 — to 8,579.19 — for the first time in five years. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France won the Nobel Prize in literature. Five years ago: The United States announced it was cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Egypt in response to the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi and the crackdown by the military-backed government on his supporters. Critic, author and editor Stanley Kauffmann, 97, died in New York. One year ago: Declaring, “The war on coal is over,” EPA chief Scott Pruitt said he would sign a new rule overriding the Clean Power Plan, an effort from the Obama administration to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. ESPN suspended anchor Jemele Hill for two weeks for making political statements on social media; Hill had referred to President Donald Trump as a“white supremacist” in a series of tweets.