Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On Sept. 29, 2005, John G. Roberts Jr. was sworn in as the nation’s 17th chief justice after winning Senate confirmation.
On this date:
1789: The U.S. War Department established a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.
1910: The National Urban League had its beginnings in New York as The Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes.
1918: Allied forces began their decisive breakthrough of the Hindenburg Line during World War I.
1938: British, French, German and Italian leaders concluded the Munich Agreement, which was aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1943: General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice aboard the British ship HMS Nelson off Malta.
1962: Canada joined the space age as it launched the Alouette 1 satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The musical “My Fair Lady” closed on Broadway after 2,717 performances.
1975: Baseball manager Casey Stengel died in Glendale, California, at age 85.
1978: Pope John Paul I was found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
1982: Extra-strength Tylenol capsules laced with deadly cyanide claimed the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. To date, the case remains unsolved.
1999: The Associated Press reported on the killing of hundreds of South Korean refugees by U.S. soldiers in the early days of the Korean War, beneath a bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri. In 2001, after its own investigation, the U.S. Army affirmed that killings had occurred, but said they were not deliberate.
2000: Israeli riot police stormed a major Jerusalem shrine and opened fire on stone-throwing Muslim worshippers, killing four Palestinians and wounding 175.
2001: President George W. Bush condemned
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers for harboring Osama bin Laden and his followers as the United States pressed its military and diplomatic campaign against terror.
Ten years ago: Anti-austerity protests erupted across Europe; Greek doctors and railway employees walked off the job, Spanish workers shut down trains and buses, and one man rammed a cement truck into the Irish parliament to protest the country’s enormous bank bailouts. Actor Tony Curtis, 85, died in Henderson, Nevada.
Five years ago: President Barack Obama, hosting a U.N. gathering of world leaders, pledged all possible tools — military, intelligence and economic — to defeat the Islamic State group, but acknowledged the extremist group had taken root in Syria and Iraq, was resilient and was continuing to expand.
One year ago: In an interview that aired on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said he took “full responsibility” for the grisly killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but he denied allegations that he had ordered it. Low-price fashion chain Forever 21, once a hot destination for teen shoppers, announced that it had filed for bankruptcy protection and said it would close as many as 178 stores.