TODAY IN HISTORY
1867: The United States took formal possession of Alaska from Russia. 1892: The first long-distance telephone line between New York and Chicago was officially opened (it could only handle one call at a time). 1898: The American flag
was raised in Puerto Rico shortly before Spain formally relinquished control of the island to the U.S.
1944: Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia during World War II.
1954: Texas Instruments unveiled the Regency TR1, the first commercially produced transistor radio. 1962: James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were honored with the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA.
1968: The U.S. Olympic Committee suspended Tommie Smith and John Carlos for giving a “Black power” salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
1969: The federal government banned artificial sweeteners known as cyclamates because of evidence they caused cancer in laboratory rats. 1972: Congress passed the Clean Water Act, overriding President Richard Nixon’s veto.
1977: West German commandos stormed a hijacked Lufthansa jetliner on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia, freeing all 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers.
2001: CBS News announced that an employee in anchorman Dan Rather’s office had tested positive for skin anthrax. Four disciples of Osama bin Laden were sentenced in New York to life without parole for their roles in the deadly 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
2009: Jessica Watson, a 16-year-old Australian, steered her bright pink yacht out of Sydney Harbor to start her bid to become the youngest person to sail solo and unassisted around the world. (She succeeded, returning to Sydney Harbor in May 2010.)
2010: Four men snared in an FBI sting were convicted of plotting to blow up New York City synagogues and shoot down military planes with the help of a paid informant who’d convinced them he was a terror operative. (Defendants James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen were each sentenced to 25 years in prison.)
2014: The Supreme Court said Texas could use its controversial new voter identification law for the November election, rejecting an emergency request from the Justice Department and civil rights groups to prohibit the state from requiring voters to produce certain forms of photo ID. (Three justices dissented.)
2019: The world’s first all-female spacewalking team, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, replaced a broken part of the International Space Station’s power grid. A bomb killed more than 60 people during prayers at a mosque in the Afghan village of Jodari.