Today’s highlights in history
On Sept. 16, 1810, Mexico began its revolt against Spanish rule.
On this date
In 1893, more than 100,000 settlers swarmed onto a section of land in Oklahoma known as the “Cherokee Strip.”
In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act.
In 1974, President Gerald R. Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam war deserters and draft-evaders.
In 1976, the Episcopal Church, at its General Convention in Minneapolis, formally approved the ordination of women as priests and bishops.
In 1982, the massacre of between 1,200 and 1,400 Palestinians, some of them children, at the hands of Israeli-allied Christian Phalange militiamen began in west Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
In 1994, a federal jury in Anchorage, Alaska, ordered Exxon Corp. to pay $5 billion in punitive damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (the U.S Supreme Court later reduced that amount to $507.5 million).
In 2013, Aaron Alexis, a former U.S. Navy reservist, went on a shooting rampage inside the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 victims before being shot dead by police.
Ten years ago: Mary Travers, 72, from the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died in Danbury, Conn.
Five years ago: President Barack Obama declared that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa could threaten security around the world and ordered 3,000 U.S. troops to the region in emergency aid muscle.
One year ago: Some Republican senators considering the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern over a woman’s allegation that a drunken Kavanaugh had groped her and tried to take off her clothes at a party when they were teenagers.