Today in History
Today is Wednesday, Oct. 14, the 288th day of 2020. There are 78 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Oct. 14, 1964, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
On this date:
In 1890, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States, was born in Denison, Texas.
In 1933, Nazi Germany announced it was withdrawing from the League of Nations.
In 1939, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the HMS Royal Oak, a British battleship anchored at Scapa Flow in Scotland’s Orkney Islands; 833 of the more than 1,200 men aboard were killed.
In 1944, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took his own life rather than face trial and certain execution for allegedly conspiring against Adolf Hitler.
In 1947, U.S. Air Force Capt. Charles E. (“Chuck”) Yeager (YAY’-gur) became the first test pilot to break the sound barrier as he flew the experimental Bell XS-1 (later X-1) rocket plane over Muroc Dry Lake in California.
In 1960, the idea of a Peace Corps was suggested by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to an audience of students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
In 1964, Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev was toppled from power; he was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and by Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
In 1968, the first successful live telecast from a manned U.S. spacecraft was transmitted from Apollo 7.
In 1981, the new president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak (HOHS’-nee moo-BAH’rahk), was sworn in to succeed the assassinated Anwar Sadat. Mubarak pledged loyalty to Sadat’s policies.
In 2001, as U.S. jets opened a second week of raids in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush sternly rejected a Taliban offer to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a third country.
In 2014, a second nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas came down with Ebola after contracting it from a dying patient. (The nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, was later declared free of the disease.)
In 2017, a truck bombing in Somalia’s capital killed more than 500 people in one of the world’s deadliest attacks in years; officials blamed the attack on the extremist group al-Shabab and said it was meant to target Mogadishu’s international airport, but the bomb detonated in a crowded street after soldiers opened fire. The board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revoked the membership of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, after published reports about allegations of sexual harassment and rape against Weinstein.
Ten years ago: Chile’s 33 rescued miners posed with President Sebastian Pinera and were examined by doctors a day after they were freed from their underground prison. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (ah-muhDEE’-neh-zhahd) taunted arch-enemy Israel from just across the tense border in Lebanon, rallying tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters.
Five years ago: Hundreds of soldiers fanned out in cities across Israel and authorities erected concrete barriers outside some Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem in a stepped-up effort to counter a monthlong wave of Palestinian violence. The state of Texas executed Licho Escamilla (LEE’cho es-kuh-MEE’-uh) for the fatal 2001 shooting of Christopher Kevin James, a Dallas police officer who was trying to break up a brawl involving Escamilla.