On this date
In 1915, a mob in Cobb County, Ga., lynched Jewish businessman Leo Frank, 31, whose death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had been commuted to life imprisonment. In 1943, the Allied conquest of Sicily during World War II was completed as U.S. and British forces entered Messina. In 1969, Hurricane Camille slammed into the Mississippi coast as a Category 5 storm that was blamed for 256 U.S. deaths, three in Cuba. In 1985, more than 1,400 meatpackers walked off the job at the Geo. A. Hormel and Co.’s main plant in Austin, Minn., in a bitter strike that lasted just over a year. In 1987, Rudolf Hess, the last member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, died at Spandau Prison at age 93, an apparent suicide. In 1996, the Reform Party announced Ross Perot had been selected to be its first-ever presidential nominee. In 1998, President Bill Clinton gave grand jury testimony via closedcircuit television from the White House concerning his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ten years ago: President Barack Obama, addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, chastised the defense industry and Congress for wasting tax dollars “with doctrine and weapons better suited to fight the Soviets on the plains of Europe than insurgents in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan.” Five years ago: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder ordered a federal medical examiner to perform another autopsy on the remains of Michael Brown, a black Missouri teenager whose fatal shooting by a white police officer spurred a week of rancorous and sometimes violent protests in suburban St. Louis. One year ago: President Donald Trump said he had canceled plans for a Veterans Day military parade, citing what he called a “ridiculously high” price tag; he accused local politicians of price-gouging.