Today in history

On Aug. 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, on the expedition that carried him to the New World.

In 1904 Britain, worried about Russian influence in Tibet, occupied the country with troops from India, as the 13th Dalai Lama fled.

In 1914 Germany declared war on France.

In 1923 Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th president, a day after Warren Harding died.

In 1936 the State Department urged Americans in Spain to leave because of that country’s civil war.

In 1943 Gen. George Patton slapped a private at an Army hospital in Sicily, accusing him of cowardice. (Patton later was ordered by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to apologize for this and a second similar episode.)

In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor and admitted ex-communist, named Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, as a onetime key member of the communist underground in Washington; Hiss denied the charge. (Hiss’ first trial, in 1949, ended in a hung jury; he was found guilty in 1950 in his second trial.)

In 1949 the National Basketball Association was formed.

In 1951 the U.S. Military Academy dismissed 90 cadets for cheating on exams.

In 1958 the atomic-powered submarine Nautilus made the first undersea crossing of the North Pole.

In 1981 U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike, despite a warning from President Ronald Reagan that they would be fired, which they were.

In 1987 the Iran-Contra congressional hearings ended, with none of the 29 witnesses tying President Ronald Reagan directly to the diversion of arms-sales profits to Nicaraguan rebels.

In 1993 the Senate voted 96-3 to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 1994 Stephen Breyer was sworn in as the Supreme Court’s newest justice in a private ceremony at Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Vermont summer home. Also in 1994 Arkansas carried out the nation’s first triple execution in 32 years.

In 1995 a Palestinian, Eyad Ismoil, was flown to the United States from Jordan to face charges that he had driven a bomb-laden van into New York’s World Trade Center. (The 1993 explosion killed six people and injured more than 1,000; Ismoil is serving a life sentence.)

In 1999 arbitrators ruled the government had to pay the heirs of Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder $16 million for his film of the assassination of President John Kennedy.

In 2003 the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies further paved the way for the Rev. V. Gene Robinson to become the denomination’s first openly gay bishop, approving him on a 2-1 vote.

In 2004 Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge defended the decision to tighten security in New York and Washington even though the intelligence behind the latest terror warnings was as much as four years old. Also in 2004 the Statue of Liberty pedestal in New York reopened to the public for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In 2013 an Italian tourist on her honeymoon was killed and 16 others injured when a driver careened through a crowd in Venice, Calif. Also in 2013 Zimbabwe’s electoral commission announced that President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the east African nation for 33 years, won re-election.

In 2014 a magnitude-6.1 earthquake killed 589 people and injured 2,400 in Yunnan province in southwest China.

In 2015 President Barack Obama, in a sweeping bid to curb heat-trapping pollution altering the planet’s climate, unveiled the first-ever limits on carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s power plants.