TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Wednesday,
April 24, the 115th day of 2024. There are 251 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY:
On April 24, 1995, the final bomb linked to the Unabomber exploded inside the Sacramento, California, offices of a lobbying group for the wood products industry, killing chief lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray. (Theodore Kaczynski was later sentenced to four lifetimes in prison for a series of bombings that killed three people and injured 29 others.)
ON THIS DATE:
In 1877, federal troops were ordered out of New
Orleans, ending the North’s post-civil War rule in the South.
In 1961, in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the White House issued a statement saying that President John F. Kennedy “bears sole responsibility for the events of the past few days.”
In 1962, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal, between Camp Parks, California, and Westford, Massachusetts.
In 1967, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when his Soyuz 1 spacecraft smashed into the Earth after his parachutes failed to deploy properly during re-entry; he was the first human spaceflight fatality.
In 1980, the United States launched an unsuccessful attempt to free the American hostages in Iran, a mission that resulted in the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen.
In 1990, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the $1.5 billion Hubble Space
Telescope.
In 2013, in Bangladesh, a shoddily constructed eightstory commercial building housing garment factories collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people.
In 2017, two inmates received lethal injections on the same gurney about three hours apart as Arkansas completed the nation’s first double execution since 2000, just days after the state ended a nearly 12-year hiatus on administering capital punishment.
In 2018, former police officer Joseph Deangelo was arrested at his home near Sacramento, California, after DNA linked him to crimes attributed to the so-called Golden State
Killer; authorities believed he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes in the 1970s and 1980s. (Deangelo would plead guilty in 2020 to 13 counts of murder and be sentenced to life in prison without parole.)
In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert about the dangers of using a malaria drug that President Donald Trump had repeatedly promoted for coronavirus patients. The parent company of Lysol and another disinfectant warned that its products should not be used as an internal treatment for the coronavirus, a day after Trump wondered aloud about that prospect during a White House briefing.