TODAY IN HISTORY

1811: George, the Prince of Wales, was named Prince Regent due to the mental illness of his father, Britain’s King George III.

1917: Mexico’s present constitution was adopted by the Constitutional Convention in Santiago de Queretaro.

1918: During World War I, the Cunard liner SS Tuscania, which was transporting about 2,000 American troops to Europe, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Irish Sea with the loss of more than 200 people.

1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices; the proposal, which failed in Congress, drew accusations that Roosevelt was attempting to “pack” the nation’s highest court.

1983: Former Nazi Gestapo official Klaus Barbie, expelled from Bolivia, was brought to Lyon, France, to stand trial. (He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison – he died in 1991.)

1988: The Arizona House impeached Republican Gov. Evan Mecham, setting the stage for his trial in the state Senate, where he was convicted of obstructing justice and misusing state funds allegedly funneled to his Pontiac dealership.

1993: President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, granting workers up to 12 weeks unpaid leave for family emergencies.

1994: White separatist Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and was immediately sentenced to life in prison. (Beckwith died Jan. 21, 2001 at age 80.)

2001: Four disciples of Osama bin Laden went on trial in New York in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. (The four were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.)

2002: A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., indicted John Walker Lindh on ten charges, alleging he was trained by Osama bin Laden’s network and then conspired with the Taliban to kill Americans. (Lindh later pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. He was released in May 2019 after serving more than 17 years.)