TODAY IN HISTORY

1630: The Massachusetts village of

Shawmut changed its name to Boston.

1908: General Motors was founded in

Flint, Michigan, by William C. Durant.

1940: Samuel T. Rayburn of Texas was elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

1966: The Metropolitan Opera opened its new opera house at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.”

1972: “The Bob Newhart Show” premiered on CBS.

1974: President Gerald Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam war deserters and draft evaders.

1982: The massacre of between 1,200 and 1,400 Palestinian men, women and children at the hands of Israeliallied Christian Phalange militiamen began in west Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

1987: Two dozen countries signed the Montreal Protocol, a treaty designed to save the Earth’s ozone layer by calling on nations to reduce emissions of harmful chemicals by the year 2000.

2001: President George W. Bush said there was “no question” Osama bin Laden and his followers were the prime suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks; Bush pledged the government would “find them, get them running and hunt them down.”

2007: Contractors for the U.S. security firm Blackwater USA guarding a U.S. State Department convoy in Baghdad opened fire on civilian vehicles, mistakenly believing they were under attack; 14 Iraqis died.

Aaron Alexis, a former U.S. Navy reservist, went on a shooting rampage inside the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 people before being shot dead by police.