TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Friday, April 16.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

in one of America’s worst school attacks, a college senior killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech before taking his own life.

ON THIS DATE

President-elect George Washington left Mount Vernon, Virginia, for his inauguration in New York.

during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia.

aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright was born in Millville, Indiana (his brother Orville was born five years later in Dayton, Ohio).

American aviator Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, leaving Dover, England, and arriving near Calais, France, in 59 minutes.

a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea torpedoed and sank the MV Goya, which Germany was using to transport civilian refugees and wounded soldiers; it’s estimated that up to 7,000 people died.

the cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor in Texas

City, Texas; a nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day; the blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests.

Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon with astronauts John W. Young, Charles M. Duke Jr. and Ken Mattingly on board.

Alex Haley, author of the best-seller“Roots,” visited the Gambian village of Juffure, where, he believed, his ancestor Kunte Kinte was captured as a slave in 1767.

the U.S government accused Wall Street’s most powerful firm of fraud, saying Goldman Sachs & Co. had sold mortgage investments without telling buyers the securities were crafted with input from a client who was betting on them to fail. (In July 2010, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but did not admit wrongdoing.)

Ten years ago: A Taliban sleeper agent walked into a meeting of NATO trainers and Afghan troops at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in the eastern Afghan province of

Laghman and detonated a vest of explosives hidden underneath his uniform; six American troops, four Afghan soldiers and an interpreter were killed.

Five years ago: In an extraordinary gesture, Pope Francis brought 12 Syrian Muslims to Italy aboard his plane after an emotional visit to the Greek island of Lesbos, which was facing the brunt of Europe’s migration crisis. One year ago: President Donald Trump gave governors a road map for easing coronavirus restrictions, laying out a “phased and deliberate approach” to restoring normal activity in places that had strong testing in place and were seeing a decrease in COVID-19 cases.

— THE ASSOCIATED PRESS