TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is the 296th day of 2021. There are 69 days left in the year.
Saturday, Oct. 23, Today’s Highlight
On Oct. 23, 1973, President Richard Nixon agreed to turn over White House tape recordings subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor to Judge John J. Sirica.
On this date
the first Parliament of Great Britain, created by the Acts of Union between England and Scotland, held its first meeting.
forces led by Union Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis repelled Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s army in the Civil War Battle of Westport in Missouri.
tens of thousands of women paraded up Fifth Avenue in New York City, demanding the right to vote.
the World War II Battle of Leyte Gulf began, resulting in a major Allied victory against Japanese forces.
241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines, were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon; a near-simultaneous attack on French forces killed 58 paratroopers.
the U.S. Senate rejected, 58-42, the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork.
23 people were killed in an explosion at Phillips Petroleum Co.‘s chemical complex in Pasadena, Texas.
the nation’s anthrax scare hit the White House with the discovery of a small concentration of spores at an offsite mail processing center.
President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect non-infected patients.
during a debate with Democratic rival Joe Donnelly, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that when a woman becomes pregnant during rape, “it is something that God intended to happen.” Mourdock went on to lose the November election to Donnelly.
officials announced that an emergency room doctor who’d recently returned to New York City after treating Ebola patients in West Africa tested positive for the virus, becoming the first case in the city and the fourth in the nation. (Dr. Craig Spencer later recovered.)
Ten years ago: Libya’s interim rulers declared the country liberated, formally marking the end of Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year tyranny. A 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Turkey, killing some 600 people.
Five years ago: A tour bus returning home to Los Angeles from a casino trip plowed into the back of a slow-moving semi-truck on a California highway, killing 13 people. Bill Murray received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
One year ago: Drugmakers AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson announced the resumption of U.S. testing of their COVID-19 vaccine candidates. France surpassed 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, becoming the second country in Western Europe (after Spain) to reach the mark. President Donald Trump announced that Sudan would start to normalize ties with Israel, making it the third Arab state to do so as part of U.S.-brokered deals in the run-up to Election Day.